* How developers contribute to Eat Here is how software developers can contribute to Eat. ** Documenting your changes Any change that matters to end-users should have an entry in etc/NEWS. Try to start each NEWS entry with a sentence that summarizes the entry and takes just one line -- this will allow to read NEWS in Outline mode after hiding the body of each entry. Doc-strings should be updated together with the code. Think about whether your change requires updating the manuals. If you know it does not, mark the NEWS entry with "---". If you know that *all* the necessary documentation updates have been made as part of your changes or those by others, mark the entry with "+++". Otherwise do not mark it. If your change requires updating the manuals to document new functions/commands/variables/faces, then use the proper Texinfo command to index them; for instance, use @vindex for variables and @findex for functions/commands. For the full list of predefined indices, see https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Predefined-Indices.html or run the shell command 'info "(texinfo)Predefined Indices"'. We prefer American English both in doc strings and in the manuals, just like Emacs. That includes both spelling (e.g., "behavior", not "behaviour") and the convention of leaving 2 spaces between sentences. Eat follows Emacs doc style. For more specific tips on Emacs's doc style, see https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Documentation-Tips.html Use 'checkdoc' to check for documentation errors before submitting a patch. ** Testing your changes Please test your changes before committing them or sending them to the list. "make check" runs all the tests. You will need to set "EMACSFLAGS" so that the checker can find the dependencies. If possible, add a new test along with any bug fix or new functionality you commit (of course, some changes cannot be easily tested, but the terminal emulator part should be as much tested as possible). Eat uses ERT, Emacs Lisp Regression Testing, for testing. See https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/ert/ or run 'info "(ert)"' for more information on writing and running tests. If your test lasts longer than some few seconds, mark it in its 'ert-deftest' definition with ":tags '(:expensive-test)". ** Commit messages Ordinarily, a change you commit should contain a log entry in its commit message and should not touch the repository's ChangeLog files. Here is an example commit message (indented): Deactivate shifted region Do not silently extend a region that is not highlighted; this can happen after a shift (Bug#19003). * doc/emacs/mark.texi (Shift Selection): Document the change. * lisp/window.el (handle-select-window): * src/frame.c (Fhandle_switch_frame, Fselected_frame): Deactivate the mark. Here are guidelines for formatting commit message: - Start with a single unindented summary line explaining the change; do not end this line with a period. If possible, try to keep the summary line to 50 characters or fewer; this is for compatibility with certain Git commands that print that line in width-constrained contexts. If the summary line starts with a semicolon and a space "; ", the commit message will be ignored when generating the ChangeLog file. Use this for minor commits that do not need separate ChangeLog entries, such as changes in etc/NEWS. - After the summary line, there should be an empty line. - Unindented ChangeLog entries normally come next. However, if the commit couldn't be properly summarized in the brief summary line, you can put a paragraph (after the empty line and before the individual ChangeLog entries) that further describes the commit. - Lines in ChangeLog entries should preferably be not longer than 63 characters, and must not exceed 78 characters, unless they consist of a single word of at most 140 characters; this 78/140 limit is enforced by a commit hook. - If only a single file is changed, the summary line can be the normal file first line (starting with the asterisk). Then there is no individual files section. - If the commit has more than one author, the commit message should contain separate lines to mention the other authors, like the following: Co-authored-by: Joe Schmoe - If the commit is a tiny change that is exempt from copyright paperwork, the commit message should contain a separate line like the following: Copyright-paperwork-exempt: yes - The commit message should not contain any reference to any Codeberg issue. - The commit message should contain "Bug#NNNNN" if it is related to bug number NNNNN in the debbugs database. This string is often parenthesized, as in "(Bug#19003)". - When citing URLs, prefer https: to http: when either will do. - Commit messages should contain only printable UTF-8 characters. - Commit messages should not contain the "Signed-off-by:" lines that are used in some other projects. - Any lines of the commit message that start with "; " are omitted from the generated ChangeLog. - Explaining the rationale for a design choice is best done in comments in the source code. However, sometimes it is useful to describe just the rationale for a change; that can be done in the commit message between the summary line and the file entries. - Eat follows the GNU coding standards for ChangeLogs: see https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Change-Logs.html or run 'info "(standards)Change Logs"'. - Some commenting rules in the GNU coding standards also apply to ChangeLog entries: they must be in English, and be complete sentences starting with a capital and ending with a period (except the summary line should not end in a period). See https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Comments.html or run 'info "(standards)Comments"'. American English is preferred in Eat, just like Emacs; that includes spelling and leaving 2 blanks between sentences. They are preserved indefinitely, and have a reasonable chance of being read in the future, so it's better that they have good presentation. - Use the present tense; describe "what the change does", not "what the change did". - Preferred form for several entries with the same content: * lisp/menu-bar.el (clipboard-yank, clipboard-kill-ring-save) (clipboard-kill-region): * lisp/eshell/esh-io.el (eshell-virtual-targets) (eshell-clipboard-append): Replace option gui-select-enable-clipboard with select-enable-clipboard; renamed October 2014. (Bug#25145) (Rather than anything involving "ditto" and suchlike.) - There is no standard or recommended way to identify revisions in ChangeLog entries. Using Git SHA1 values limits the usability of the references to Git, and will become much less useful if Eat. switches to a different VCS. So we recommend against doing only that. One way to identify revisions is by quoting their summary line. Prefixing the summary with the commit date can give useful context (use 'git show -s "--pretty=format:%cd \"%s\"" --date=short HASH' to produce that). Often, "my previous commit" will suffice. - There is no need to mention files such as NEWS and MAINTAINERS, or to indicate regeneration of files such as 'lib/gnulib.mk', in the ChangeLog entry. "There is no need" means you don't have to, but you can if you want to. ** Committing your changes. Your commit message must meet the following critiria: - commit log message must not be empty; - the first line of the commit log message doesn't start with whitespace characters; - the second line of the commit log message must be empty; - commit log message should include only valid printable ASCII and UTF-8 characters; - commit log message lines must be shorter than 79 characters, unless a line consists of a single long word, in which case that word can be up to 140 characters long; - there shouldn't be any "Signed-off-by:" tags in the commit log message, and "git commit" should not be invoked with the '-s' option (which automatically adds "Signed-off-by:"); - if the commit adds new files, the file names must not begin with '-' and must consist of ASCII letters, digits, and characters of the set [-+./_]; - the changes don't include unresolved merge conflict markers; - the changes don't introduce whitespace errors: trailing whitespace, lines that include nothing but whitespace characters, and indented lines where a SPC character is immediately followed by a TAB in the line's initial indentation This is not enforced right now, but it'll happen eventually. ** Committing changes by others If committing changes written by someone else, commit in their name, not yours. You can use 'git commit --author="AUTHOR"' to specify a change's author. When using Emacs VC to commit, the author can be specified in the log-edit buffer by adding an "Author: AUTHOR" header line (set 'log-edit-setup-add-author' non-nil to have this header line added automatically). Note that the validity checks described in the previous section are still applied, so you will have to correct any problems they uncover in the changes submitted by others. ** git vs rename Git does not explicitly represent a file renaming; it uses a percent changed heuristic to deduce that a file was renamed. So if you are planning to make extensive changes to a file after renaming it (or moving it to another directory), you should: - Create a feature branch. - Commit the rename without any changes. - Make other changes. - Merge the feature branch to the master branch, instead of squashing the commits into one. The commit message on this merge should summarize the renames and all the changes. Adapted from CONTRIBUTE in Emacs source tree. This file is part of Eat and is not part of GNU Emacs. Eat is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Eat is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see . Local variables: mode: outline paragraph-separate: "[ ]*$" coding: utf-8 end: