Development process
Contents
OTHER PAGES WITH MORE INFO
Some of the pages listed here are certainly redundant. A good plan would be to remove/merge some of these pages, and have this page be a high-level summary with pointers to the more detailed pages.
Overview for new developers
New developers need to take the following steps:
- get access to the source code repository
- get logins for the wiki, forum, and issue tracker
The next section briefly describes how to access these resources, and includes pointers to more detailed information.
Software Engineering Resources
Source code repository
The source code repository uses Subversion, and is located at NERSC, at the server portal-auth.nersc.gov using the "svn+ssh" protocol. You'll need a NERSC account, and a sponsoring developer can help you with this.
Note that we have some scripts to help make checkouts and merges easier and avoid errors, since we use a basic form of branch development to manage releases. For simple trunk development you might be able to get away with raw SVN checkouts, but you'll want learn more about scripts before doing anything complex anyway.
You can find more information here: Version Control
Issue tracker
Wiki
If you're reading this, you already know this wiki is a good place to quickly put information for users and developers. We also have other documentation (i.e. manuals) which have, obviously, slightly different uses and organizations. Hit the "create account" button at the top of the page to join.
You can find more information here: JoinWiki
Forum
You might want to also join the VisIt users forum.
You can join here: http://visitusers.org/forum/YaBB.pl
Making changes to the code
- checking out
- committing
- sending email to visit-commits
- link to svn scripts
- commenting code
- commit comment
specifics of branch or release candidate development
- merging
- handling problems, like conflicts
- backing out a merge
release process
testing
- responsibility to watch for testing error messages
- need nersc_username_to_email, right?
