NOTE: This is work in progress!!

This document is intended to capture some of the policies we would like all committers to follow when it comes to checking in changes into our SVN tree.

Commit Log Format

TS-#### short summary (50 chars or less), not a sentence

More detailed explanatory text, if necessary.  Wrap it to about 72
characters or so.  In some contexts, the first line is treated as the
subject of an email and the rest of the text as the body.  The blank
line separating the summary from the body is critical (unless you omit
the body entirely); tools like rebase can get confused if you run the
two together.

Trunk

Trunk is CTR, Commit-Then-Review, policy. This was discussed and voted on by the community a long time ago. This does grant a lof of freedom to committing experimental or unstable code to the trunk. However, with such powers, comes some responsibilities:

1. You are responsible for latest trunk to build and at least start up with your changes before you commit to SVN. This typically implies that you ought to do an "svn up" to your tree and build before committing. Of course, we don't expect everyone to test on more than their preferred development platform(s), and we'll work with the Infraops team to increase our coverage with continuous integration tools and build-bots. At a minimum the the build should not break on the current primary buildbot slave which is http://ci.apache.org/buildslaves/bb-vm_ubuntu (Ubuntu Linux). If the primary build bot is broken it is the commiter's responsibility to get the build working or find someone to help them.
2. If the trunk is broken (i.e. it doesn't build and/or run even without your changes), please don't commit! Meaning, please don't pour more fuel on the fire. If your changes result in a non-functioning Traffic Server (e.g. start fails, simple forward proxy browsing is broken, etc) please consider backing out your changes and submitting the changes for review under a Jira Ticket and asking for reviewers.
3. If your changes are so large that you want to make partial commits, please create a SVN branch or work on a local repository using a version control system like Git or Mercurial. Several of the developers in the community use Git and hg, and can provide help and tips on how to use it.

Release branches

All release branches (e.g. 2.0.x) should always be kept in a stable and functional state. The commit policy is RTC, Review Then Commit, and backporting changes from trunk should be voted on via the STATUS file on the respective branches.