Contributing changes to ["Mercurial"]
Matt is trying to streamline his fairly complex process of merging ["Patch"]es from the MailingList. So please try to do the following:
Use hg export where possible.
** This will get your name in the changelog without any extra editing on his part.
- Make sure your description is complete.
** If using hg export, he wants the description /in the exported patch/.
- Make sure your description starts with a reasonable one-line summary.
Some other useful guidelines:
In general, think of ["Mercurial"] as following a process similar to KernelPractice.
- ["Serve"] a ["Repository"] over HTTP that contains your changes, so Matt only needs to ["Pull"] from it if he likes the changes.
** Send your changes as ["Patch"]es to the MailingList anyway, so other people on the mailing list can review what you're doing.
- If you're sending ["Patch"]es, attach only one per message.
** If you are emailing a ["Patch"] directly to Matt, copy the MailingList.
- Make sure the ["Patch"]es you send apply cleanly against the current ["Tip"].
- MIME-attached ["Patch"]es are preferable to cut-and-paste copies of ["Patch"]es, because many mailers will screw up the white space of inline ["Patch"]es, so they will not apply cleanly.
- Each ["Patch"] should make sense in and of itself, and not contain pieces of unrelated stuff that you noticed and decided to fix up.
- Follow the prevailing coding style in the code you're modifying, not what you think it /ought/ to be.
- Patches should not contain tab characters.
- Patches should not contain trailing white space.
- If you are cleaning up white space, do it in a self-contained patch that contains no functional changes.