Submitting code to OpenSim

Revision as of 06:04, 11 February 2009

• There are several guidelines to the patch review process. You will need to agree to our Contributions_Policy and be willing to take feedback on the patch. Not all patches will make it into OpenSimulator for a variety of potential reasons. OpenSimulator is not trying to be 'everything for everyone' so, often, it's requested that the functionality be implemented in a module that gets it's own project on forge.

• Please review the Coding Standards and stick to them in your patch. The only exception should be if the surrounding code does not conform to these guidelines (although in that case, a patch to make it conform would be much appreciated). Patches which do not follow the guidelines may be rejected.

Code is submitted to OpenSim via patches attached to our Mantis bug tracker. One way to generate these is by using the Subversion command line

svn diff > my.patch

from the root OpenSim directory. This will package up all your changes into a nice easily appliable file. If you are using TortoiseSVN on Windows, you can right-click in the opensim directory and select "Create patch" to create a diff.

• Please run the unit tests (via nant test on the command line) before submitting your patch. Patches that add new tests (either to test accompanying patch code or to test existing code) are very welcome.

• Please put only one logical change in a patch at a time. Patches that contain more than one logical change tend to be larger, more complex and hence take more time to be applied. At worse, developers will tend not to look at them because it's hard to disentangle all the possible effects.

• In your Mantis, the title line should ideally start with [PATCH]. When you've opened it, change the state to patch included. Once you've put in on a Mantis, you may want to hop on the IRC channels and mention it someone there (though at the moment we're pretty good at getting round to these, since e-mails about newly opened mantis entries are sent to developers automatically).

• Once you've submitted your patch you should move the Mantis entry into the Patch Included state to let us know there's a patch waiting to be applied.

• General turnaround time for patch review is 48 hours. though, it could be up to two weeks depending on the situation. Generally, if nobody comments on your patch within 3-5 days, pop into #opensim on IRC and make sure that you remind them of the PATCH.

• If you're looking for an initial piece of code to do, the bugs in Mantis are a very good starting point. You may want to see if there's anybody on IRC to discuss the difficulty of a particular bug (they do vary, sometimes in unexpected ways).