Commit Guidelines

(draft)

Goals

The goals of those guidelines are to increase the collective productivity (with lowest possible negative influence on the individual developer productivity).

Guidelines

• Apply Patches in a Dedicated Commit, especially if they were provided by other contributors or users (= do not introduce / commit other changes).
  • This allows patch providers to verify / track the patch-application.

• Make More but Smaller Commits instead of a single larger one. Each commit should of course keep the system operative.
  • This allows other developers to follow and understand the development flow easily.

• Declare the Status of Functionality (e.g. a command-line function, and api method) as "draft" "development" "alpha" "beta" "released", if possible visible to end-users. This can contain pointers to the related working-plan.
  • This allows to gain interested or developers/contributors to some functionality

• Revert commits which break existent behaviour, or correct the error-causing parts immediately. This is especially true for the central repository (e.g. "trunk")