Here are some guidelines for working on the Guile source tree at GNU. - We use CVS to manage the Guile sources. The repository lives on totoro.red-bean.com, in /u/src/master; you will need an account on that machine to access the repository. I recommend using the cvs pserver protocol; thus, you should use the following as your CVS root: :pserver:USER@guile-cvs.red-bean.com:/u/src/master Either set your CVSROOT environment variable to that, or give it as the value of the global -d option to CVS when you check out a working directory. If you want to use SSH for security, set your CVS_RSH environment variable to ssh, and then use the following as your CVS root: :ext:guile-cvs.red-bean.com:/u/src/master The Guile sources live in several modules: - guile-core --- the interpreter, QuickThreads, and ice-9 - guile-doc --- documentation in progress. When complete, this will be incorporated into guile-core. - guile-tcltk --- the Guile/Tk interface - guile-rgx-ctax --- the Guile/Rx interface, and the ctax implementation - guile-scsh --- the port of SCSH to guile, talk to Gary Houston - As for any part of Project GNU, changes to Guile should follow the GNU coding standards. The standards are available via anonymous FTP from prep.ai.mit.edu, as /pub/gnu/standards/standards.texi and make-stds.texi. - Check Makefile.in and configure files into CVS, as well as any files used to create them (Makefile.am, configure.in); don't check in Makefiles or header files generated by configuration scripts. The general rule is that you should be able to check out a working directory of Guile from CVS, and then type "configure" and "make". - Make sure your changes compile and work, at least on your own machine, before checking them into the main branch of the Guile repository. If you really need to check in untested changes, make a branch. - When you make a user-visible change (i.e. one that should be documented, and appear in NEWS, put an asterisk in column zero of the start of the ChangeLog entry, like so: Sat Aug 3 01:27:14 1996 Gary Houston * * fports.c (scm_open_file): don't return #f, throw error. When you've written a NEWS entry and updated the documentation, go ahead and remove the asterisk. I will use the asterisks to find and document changes that haven't been dealt with before a release. - Include each log entry in both the ChangeLog and in the CVS logs. If you're using Emacs, the pcl-cvs interface to CVS has features to make this easier; it checks the ChangeLog, and generates good default CVS log entries from that. - There's no need to keep a change log for documentation files. This is because documentation is not susceptible to bugs that are hard to fix. Documentation does not consist of parts that must interact in a precisely engineered fashion; to correct an error, you need not know the history of the erroneous passage. (This is copied from the GNU coding standards.) - If you add or remove files, don't forget to update the appropriate part of the relevant Makefile.am files, and regenerate the Makefile.in. If you forget this, the snapshot and distribution processes will not work. - Make sure you have papers from people before integrating their changes or contributions. This is very frustrating, but very important to do right. From maintain.texi, "Information for Maintainers of GNU Software": When incorporating changes from other people, make sure to follow the correct procedures. Doing this ensures that the FSF has the legal right to distribute and defend GNU software. For the sake of registering the copyright on later versions ofthe software you need to keep track of each person who makes significant changes. A change of ten lines or so, or a few such changes, in a large program is not significant. *Before* incorporating significant changes, make sure that the person has signed copyright papers, and that the Free Software Foundation has received them. If you receive contributions you want to use from someone, let me know and I'll take care of the administrivia. Put the contributions aside until we have the necessary papers. - When you make substantial changes to a file, add the current year to the list of years in the copyright notice at the top of the file. - [From Mikael Djurfeldt] When working on the Guile internals, it is quite often practical to implement a scheme-level procedure which helps you examine the feature you're working on. Examples of such procedures are: pt-size, debug-hand and current-pstate. I've now put #ifdef GUILE_DEBUG around all such procedures, so that they are not compiled into the "normal" Guile library. Please do the same when you add new procedures/C functions for debugging purpose. You can define the GUILE_DEBUG flag by passing --enable-guile-debug to the configure script. Jim Blandy