Hi,
Am Sonntag, den 28.10.2007, 02:58 +0100 schrieb Peter Stuge:
On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 10:13:47AM -0700, ron minnich wrote:
I would like to take this opportunity to address all companies that are already supporting or are interested in supporting the project:
Thank you very much for your interest! I think it's great to be working with you and I am confident that you've made a good choice. With LB your products are definately able to reach new markets!
That said, it is worthwhile to keep in mind that the project has a policy for accepting contributions and additions, with the only (but important) purpose of maintaining the highest possible source code quality. This includes a requirement that any non-trivial change or addition has to be reviewed and approved (via an Acked-by line) by other LB developers.
LB developers is a scarce resource, unfortunately. There is a high risk for bottlenecks at the review stage. This is where it gets interesting for you - you can help speed up the review process considerably:
- Please talk to us (even if it is off-list) before and during major
work on the LB source code. If you are new to the code base there will probably be at least a few things that are sort-of taken for granted within the project, but not really documented anywhere. By communicating at an early stage we can help you avoid these pitfalls which we will expect you to deal with before your contributions are accepted.
- Please always work against current SVN. This may seem problematic
if you need to do major work, but see (3) below.
- Please send small patches to the mailing list often. This will
preempt the problem in (2) above. Small patches are much more easily reviewed, which means that they are likely to be approved and committed quickly. Granted - a new chipset may require a large patch, but it is still good to first send a small patch and then build upon it in subsequent patches.
- Conversely, please do not ever send a tarball of your entire
development tree. It will be flat out rejected because it requires LB developers to do a lot of extra work before any reviewing can be done. Since LB development is a voluntary effort it could even be considered impolite to expect someone else to do a lot of extra work in order for your changes to be included.
- Always expect at least two or three rounds of reviews and changes
before your patch is included. This is connected to (1) above. The more you communicate with LB developers before and during development, the fewer review rounds will be needed before the patch is accepted.
- Please pay close attention to the contribution guidelines on the
wiki. Make sure that things such as coding style, documentation style, clear licensing statements, sign-off etc are all adequately cared for in your patch. Also remember to remove any dead code that was used only for debugging.
If you have already been involved in other open source projects, this will be rather familiar. Hopefully you even consider it to be common sense. If you have questions about any of our practices, please feel free to ask us anything - we'll be happy to answer so that we can include your contributions as quickly as possible.
We want to create world class boot software and we are very happy to have your help! :)
This is a nice write-up and summary. Therefore I would like to see this in the wiki. But I have not been able to come up with a nice wiki-title
- Patch Quality (does not fit, IMHO) - Hints for contibuting companies / contributors
and where to link to it from.
If someone can answer the two issues above and nobody minds, I will add it to the wiki.
Greetings,
Paul