This is the first file you should be reading after you get your CVS account. We'll assume you're basically familiar with CVS, but feel free to post your questions on the mailing list. Please have a look at http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/ for more detailed information on CVS. PHP is developed through the efforts of a large number of people. Collaboration is a Good Thing(tm), and CVS lets us do this. Thus, following some basic rules with regards to CVS usage will: a. Make everybody happier, especially those responsible for maintaining the CVS itself. b. Keep the changes consistently well documented and easily trackable. c. Prevent some of those 'Oops' moments. d. Increase the general level of good will on planet Earth. Having said that, here are the organizational rules: 1. Respect other people working on the project. 2. Discuss any significant changes on the list before committing. 3. Look at EXTENSIONS file to see who is the primary maintainer of the code you want to contribute to. 4. If you "strongly disagree" about something another person did, don't start fighting publicly - take it up in private email. 5. If you don't know how to do something, ask first! 6. Test your changes before committing them. We mean it. Really. To do so use "make test". 7. For development use the --enable-maintainer-zts switch to ensure your code handles TSRM correctly and doesn't break for thos who need that. Currently we have the following branches in use: HEAD Will become PHP 6.0. This CVS branch is for active development. PHP_5_2 Is used to release the PHP 5.2.x series. Only minor feature enhancements may go in here, but please keep that as infrequent as possible. PHP_5_1 Is used to release the PHP 5.1.x series. Only bugfixes are permitted on this branch (Consult the releasemaster prior to commit). PHP_5_0 This branch is closed. PHP_4_4 Is used to release the PHP 4.4.x series. Only bugfixes are permitted on this branch (Consult the releasemaster prior to commit). PHP_4_3 This branch is closed. The next few rules are more of a technical nature. 1. DO NOT TOUCH ChangeLog! It is automagically updated from the commit messages every day. Woe be to those who attempt to mess with it. 2. All news updates intended for public viewing, such as new features, bug fixes, improvements, etc., should go into the NEWS file. NB! Lines, starting with @ will go automagically into NEWS file, but this is NOT recommended, though. Please, add news entries directly to NEWS file and don't forget to keep them adjusted and sorted. 3. Do not commit multiple file and dump all messages in one commit. If you modified several unrelated files, commit each group separately and provide a nice commit message for each one. See example below. 4. Do write your commit message in such a way that it makes sense even without the corresponding diff. One should be able to look at it, and immediately know what was modified. Definitely include the function name in the message as shown below. 5. In your commit messages, keep each line shorter than 80 characters. And try to align your lines vertically, if they wrap. It looks bad otherwise. 6. If you modified a function that is callable from PHP, prepend PHP to the function name as shown below. The format of the commit messages is pretty simple. Use a - to start a new item in your commit message. If a line begins with #, it is taken to be a comment and will not appear in the ChangeLog. Everything else goes into the ChangeLog. It is important to note that if your comment or news logline spans multiple lines, you have to put # at the beginning of _every_ such line. Example. Say you modified two files, datetime.c and string.c. In datetime.c you added a new format option for the date() function, and in string.c you fixed a memory leak in php_trim(). Don't commit both of these at once. Commit them separately and try to make sure your commit messages look something like the following. For datetime.c: - Added new 'K' format modifier to date() for printing out number of days until New Year's Eve. For string.c: - Fixed a memory leak in php_trim() resulting from improper use of zval_dtor(). #- Man, that thing was leaking all over the place! The # lines will be omitted from the ChangeLog automagically. If you fix some bugs, you should note the bug ID numbers in your commit message. Bug ID should be prefixed by "#" for easier access to bug report when developers are browsing CVS via. LXR or Bonsai. Example: Fixed bug #14016 (pgsql notice handler double free crash bug.) If you don't see your messages in ChangeLog right away, don't worry! These files are updated once a day, so your stuff will not show up until somewhat later. You can use LXR (http://lxr.php.net/) and Bonsai (http://bonsai.php.net/) to look at PHP CVS repository in various ways. To receive daily updates to ChangeLog and NEWS, send an empty message to php-cvs-daily-subscribe@lists.php.net. Happy hacking, PHP Team