Contributing

How you can get involved and contribute & participate in the Orocos project

Resources

Development strategy

The Orocos toolchain uses git, with the official repositories hosted at gitorious.

Branches

The various branches are
  • master : main development line, latest features. Replaces rtt-2.0-mainline
  • toolchain-2.0 : stable release branch for the 2.0 release series.
  • rtt-1.0-svn-patches: remains for svn bridge of 1.x release series
  • ocl-1.0-svn : remains for svn bridge of 1.x release series

The master branch gets updated when new branches are merged into it by its maintainer. This can be a merge from the bugfix branches (ie merge from toolchain-2.x) or a merge from a development branch.

The stable branch should always point to the latest toolchain-2.x tip. This isn't automated, and so it lags (probably something for a hudson job or a git commit hook).

All branches in the rtt-2.0-... are no longer updated. The rtt-2.0-mainline has been merged with master, which means that if you have a rtt-2.0-mainline branch, you can just do git pull origin master, and it will fast-forward your tree to the master branch, or you checkout the local master.

Contributing packages

You may contribute a software package to the community. It must respect the rules set out in the Component Packages section. Packages general enough can be adopted by the Orocos Toolchain Gitorious project. Make sure that your package name only contains word and number characters and underscores. A 'dash' ('-') is not acceptable in a package name.

Contributing patches

Small contributions should go on the mailing lists as patches. Larger features are best communicated using topic branches in a git repository clone from the official repositories. Send pull requests to the mailing lists. These topic branches should be hosted on a publicly available git server (e.g. github, gitorious).

NB for the Orocos v1, no git branches will be merged (due to SVN), use individual patches instead. v2 git branches can be merged without problems.

Making suggestions

The easiest way to make suggestions is to use the mailing list (register here). This allows discussion about what you are suggesting (which after all, someone else may already be working), as well as informing others of what you are interested in (or are willing to do).

Reporting bugs

Before reporting a bug, please check the Bug Tracker and in the Mailing list and Forum to see whether this is a known issue. If this is a new issue then TBD email the mailing lists, OR enter an issue in the bug tracker