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[bpt/guile.git] / HACKING

Here are some guidelines for working on the Guile source tree at GNU.

- 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.

- 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  <ghouston@actrix.gen.nz>

*	* fports.c (scm_open_file): don't return #f, throw error.

- 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 'dist-dir'
target in the relevant Makefile.in files, so the snapshot and
distribution processes will 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.



Jim Blandy