[implementations-list] Welcome, Vegard, our newest committer (was: Helping to maintain Vimpulse)

[Jason Spiro]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 11:02 AM, Alessandro Piras <laynor at gmail.com> wrote:
> it's ok for me.
> Alessandro Piras

Good.  Vegard, thank you very much for offering to help.

Vegard, the rest of this email is for you, but anyone else is free to
read it also if they want.

I added you as a Vimpulse "team member" on Assembla.  Vimpulse's
Assembla space (project page) is www.assembla.com/spaces/vimpulse.
You should now be able to do anything you want in Trac and SVN.  If I
am wrong about this, please let me know.

You can help us as much or as little as you want.  After you do any
patch reviewing or other work which gets included in Vimpulse, please
add yourself to the Acknowledgements file.

Since you're new, I think it'd be better if you not commit your own
patch until at least one person other than you has tested it and told
you it works for them on their version of *macs.  This can be a friend
or classmate of yours, or someone on IRC (Vimpulse has no IRC channel
yet, but Emacs has one), or someone on the mailing list.  Dear list:
Would one of you please volunteer to test Vegard's patch and check
that it works?

You can do whatever else you like.  Something useful, I think, would
be to deal or help deal with open issues in Trac.  But note that the
lower issue numbers -- I don't remember which but maybe up to about #5
-- are old patches that I never got around to dealing with, and ended
up forwarding the entire emails to Trac.  They're probably bitrotted
by now.  They're probably more work to deal with.  It might help to
ask the original patch senders to fix them up so you can review and
maybe commit.  Ask them to resend as a patch to current SVN.

When it's time to release a new version, type "make" to run the cat
command listed in the Makefile, then copy and paste the entire
contents of vimpulse-big.el into EmacsWiki.  We release often.
Release whenever you want.  The steps to do include editing the
version and Changelog top version, and testing to make sure that
Vimpulse will load and work on your version of Emacs and XEmacs.
Create an svn tag too.  I think it would be best if every EmacsWiki
version corresponded to some SVN numbered revision.  After you
release, bump the version in svn by adding "+svn" to its number.

When you merge in any patch, you should edit Changelog and probably
Acknowledgements.  Always make a comment in SVN when you commit.  Make
svn commits often.  If you want, just copy and paste your Changelog
comment into the svn commit comments field.

I use M-q in Emacs to re-wrap comments in the area at the top of the file.

For changes adding or significantly removing a copyright-significant
amount of code, you should also add a copyright line with the author's
name to Copyright, and ask the author to agree that they will sign a
FSF copyright assignment form if and when Vimpulse gets into Emacs.  I
don't remember anymore what "copyright-significant" means.  Maybe the
huge copyright-related mailing list thread from earlier this year
contains an answer?  I don't remember.

Vimpulse has horrible documentation.  Our documentation policy so far
has unfortunately often been lax.  I'm about to write a mail to the
list about this problem.

You may have lots of questions.  Ask us whatever you want, and ask
questions as often as you want.  There's no such thing as a stupid
question.  :)