Re: About development process.

[Rik]

On 03/24/2014 06:29 PM, Eduardo wrote:
> Hi Rik,
>
> I mail you just because I am curious about what happens when a patch is
> accepted and the bug report status is closed. The patch is suppose to be
> included for the next release?  I will appear as a coauthor of any of the
> files I have modified? It is just that I am excited about that, because
> is my first successful contribution to Octave. Thanks for your time.
>
Eduardo,

There's a lot that happens behind the scenes.  First, Octave usually works
with just two code branches: stable and development.  Because of the
introduction of a GUI for Octave in release 4.0 we are temporarily working
with three different branches.  Your code added new features and changed
the calling form of the sprand function so it couldn't be checked into
stable.  I put it on the development branch which will be part of the 4.2
release.  We just had the 3.8.1 release so, unfortunately, it's going to be
a long time before the 4.2 release.

For co-author, it's sort of right at the edge.  When the change is big
enough, which is a subjective measure, then we add the changeset author to
the Copyright notice at the top of the file.  I didn't in this case, but if
you feel strongly about it I can.

I also added your name to the list of contributors to Octave.  This list is
published at the front of the Octave Manual in the Acknowledgements section
(~pg. 3).

Thanks for contributing, and after the first changeset I think you'll find
it gets easier.  Because the project has so many lines of code we have to
standards/conventions/ways of doing things, but once you've been through
one or two changesets you know what rules we follow and you can concentrate
on the code rather than the form.

Cheers,
Rik

p.s. I'm CC'ing the octave-maintainers list because I think this is
valuable information for other new contributors.