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Committer's Guide The &os; Documentation Project 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 The &os; Documentation Project &tm-attrib.freebsd; &tm-attrib.coverity; &tm-attrib.ibm; &tm-attrib.intel; &tm-attrib.sparc; &tm-attrib.general; $FreeBSD$ $FreeBSD$ This document provides information for the &os; committer community. All new committers should read this document before they start, and existing committers are strongly encouraged to review it from time to time. Almost all &os; developers have commit rights to one or more repositories. However, a few developers do not, and some of the information here applies to them as well. (For instance, some people only have rights to work with the Problem Report database). Please see for more information. This document may also be of interest to members of the &os; community who want to learn more about how the project works. Administrative Details Login Methods &man.ssh.1;, protocol 2 only Main Shell Host freefall.FreeBSD.org src/ Subversion Root svn+ssh://repo.FreeBSD.org/base (see also ). doc/ Subversion Root svn+ssh://repo.FreeBSD.org/doc (see also ). ports/ Subversion Root svn+ssh://repo.FreeBSD.org/ports (see also ). Internal Mailing Lists developers (technically called all-developers), doc-developers, doc-committers, ports-developers, ports-committers, src-developers, src-committers. (Each project repository has its own -developers and -committers mailing lists. Archives for these lists can be found in the files /local/mail/repository-name-developers-archive and /local/mail/repository-name-committers-archive on the FreeBSD.org cluster.) Core Team monthly reports /home/core/public/monthly-reports on the FreeBSD.org cluster. Ports Management Team monthly reports /home/portmgr/public/monthly-reports on the FreeBSD.org cluster. Noteworthy src/ SVN Branches stable/8 (8.X-STABLE), stable/9 (9.X-STABLE), stable/10 (10.X-STABLE), head (-CURRENT) &man.ssh.1; is required to connect to the project hosts. For more information, see . Useful links: &os; Project Internal Pages &os; Project Hosts &os; Project Administrative Groups Open<acronym>PGP</acronym> Keys for &os; Cryptographic keys conforming to the OpenPGP (Pretty Good Privacy) standard are used by the &os; project to authenticate committers. Messages carrying important information like public SSH keys can be signed with the OpenPGP key to prove that they are really from the committer. See PGP & GPG: Email for the Practical Paranoid by Michael Lucas and for more information. Creating a Key Existing keys can be used, but should be checked with doc/head/share/pgpkeys/checkkey.sh first. For those who do not yet have an OpenPGP key, or need a new key to meet &os; security requirements, here we show how to generate one. Install security/gnupg. Enter these lines in ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf to set minimum acceptable defaults: fixed-list-mode keyid-format 0xlong personal-digest-preferences SHA512 SHA384 SHA256 SHA224 default-preference-list SHA512 SHA384 SHA256 SHA224 AES256 AES192 AES CAST5 BZIP2 ZLIB ZIP Uncompressed use-agent verify-options show-uid-validity list-options show-uid-validity sig-notation issuer-fpr@notations.openpgp.fifthhorseman.net=%g cert-digest-algo SHA512 Generate a key: &prompt.user; gpg --full-gen-key gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.8; Copyright (C) 2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Warning: using insecure memory! Please select what kind of key you want: (1) RSA and RSA (default) (2) DSA and Elgamal (3) DSA (sign only) (4) RSA (sign only) Your selection? 1 RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long. What keysize do you want? (2048) 2048 Requested keysize is 2048 bits Please specify how long the key should be valid. 0 = key does not expire <n> = key expires in n days <n>w = key expires in n weeks <n>m = key expires in n months <n>y = key expires in n years Key is valid for? (0) 3y Key expires at Wed Nov 4 17:20:20 2015 MST Is this correct? (y/N) y GnuPG needs to construct a user ID to identify your key. Real name: Chucky Daemon Email address: notreal@example.com Comment: You selected this USER-ID: "Chucky Daemon <notreal@example.com>" Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit? o You need a Passphrase to protect your secret key. 2048-bit keys with a three-year expiration provide adequate protection at present (2013-12). describes the situation in more detail. A three year key lifespan is short enough to obsolete keys weakened by advancing computer power, but long enough to reduce key management problems. Use your real name here, preferably matching that shown on government-issued ID to make it easier for others to verify your identity. Text that may help others identify you can be entered in the Comment section. After the email address is entered, a passphrase is requested. Methods of creating a secure passphrase are contentious. Rather than suggest a single way, here are some links to sites that describe various methods: , , , . Protect the private key and passphrase. If either the private key or passphrase may have been compromised or disclosed, immediately notify accounts@FreeBSD.org and revoke the key. Committing the new key is shown in . Kerberos and LDAP web Password for &os; Cluster The &os; cluster requires a Kerberos password to access certain services. The Kerberos password also serves as the LDAP web password, since LDAP is proxying to Kerberos in the cluster. Some of the services which require this include: Bugzilla Jenkins To create a new Kerberos account in the &os; cluster, or to reset a Kerberos password for an existing account using a random password generator: &prompt.user; ssh kpasswd.freebsd.org This must be done from a machine outside of the &os;.org cluster. A Kerberos password can also be set manually by logging into freefall.FreeBSD.org and running: &prompt.user; kpasswd Unless the Kerberos-authenticated services of the &os;.org cluster have been used previously, Client unknown will be shown. This error means that the ssh kpasswd.freebsd.org method shown above must be used first to initialize the Kerberos account. Commit Bit Types The &os; repository has a number of components which, when combined, support the basic operating system source, documentation, third party application ports infrastructure, and various maintained utilities. When &os; commit bits are allocated, the areas of the tree where the bit may be used are specified. Generally, the areas associated with a bit reflect who authorized the allocation of the commit bit. Additional areas of authority may be added at a later date: when this occurs, the committer should follow normal commit bit allocation procedures for that area of the tree, seeking approval from the appropriate entity and possibly getting a mentor for that area for some period of time. Committer Type Responsible Tree Components src core@ src/, doc/ subject to appropriate review doc doceng@ doc/, ports/, src/ documentation ports portmgr@ ports/ Commit bits allocated prior to the development of the notion of areas of authority may be appropriate for use in many parts of the tree. However, common sense dictates that a committer who has not previously worked in an area of the tree seek review prior to committing, seek approval from the appropriate responsible party, and/or work with a mentor. Since the rules regarding code maintenance differ by area of the tree, this is as much for the benefit of the committer working in an area of less familiarity as it is for others working on the tree. Committers are encouraged to seek review for their work as part of the normal development process, regardless of the area of the tree where the work is occurring. Policy for Committer Activity in Other Trees All committers may modify base/head/share/misc/committers-*.dot, base/head/usr.bin/calendar/calendars/calendar.freebsd, and ports/head/astro/xearth/files. doc committers may commit documentation changes to src files, such as man pages, READMEs, fortune databases, calendar files, and comment fixes without approval from a src committer, subject to the normal care and tending of commits. Any committer may make changes to any other tree with an "Approved by" from a non-mentored committer with the appropriate bit. Committers can aquire an additional bit by the usual process of finding a mentor who will propose them to core, doceng, or portmgr, as appropriate. When approved, they will be added to 'access' and the normal mentoring period will ensue, which will involve a continuing of Approved by for some period. "Approved by" is only acceptable from non-mentored src committers -- mentored committers can provide a "Reviewed by" but not an "Approved by". Subversion Primer New committers are assumed to already be familiar with the basic operation of Subversion. If not, start by reading the Subversion Book. Introduction The &os; source repository switched from CVS to Subversion on May 31st, 2008. The first real SVN commit is r179447. The &os; doc/www repository switched from CVS to Subversion on May 19th, 2012. The first real SVN commit is r38821. The &os; ports repository switched from CVS to Subversion on July 14th, 2012. The first real SVN commit is r300894. Subversion can be installed from the &os; Ports Collection by issuing these commands: &prompt.root; pkg install subversion Getting Started There are a few ways to obtain a working copy of the tree from Subversion. This section will explain them. Direct Checkout The first is to check out directly from the main repository. For the src tree, use: &prompt.user; svn checkout svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/head /usr/src For the doc tree, use: &prompt.user; svn checkout svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/doc/head /usr/doc For the ports tree, use: &prompt.user; svn checkout svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/ports/head /usr/ports Though the remaining examples in this document are written with the workflow of working with the src tree in mind, the underlying concepts are the same for working with the doc and the ports tree. Ports related Subversion operations are listed in . The above command will check out a CURRENT source tree as /usr/src/, which can be any target directory on the local filesystem. Omitting the final argument of that command causes the working copy, in this case, to be named head, but that can be renamed safely. svn+ssh means the SVN protocol tunnelled over SSH. The name of the server is repo.freebsd.org, base is the path to the repository, and head is the subdirectory within the repository. If your &os; login name is different from the login name used on the local machine, either include it in the URL (for example svn+ssh://jarjar@repo.freebsd.org/base/head), or add an entry to ~/.ssh/config in the form: Host repo.freebsd.org User jarjar This is the simplest method, but it is hard to tell just yet how much load it will place on the repository. The svn diff does not require access to the server as SVN stores a reference copy of every file in the working copy. This, however, means that Subversion working copies are very large in size. Checkout from a Mirror Check out a working copy from a mirror by substituting the mirror's URL for svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base. This can be an official mirror or a mirror maintained by using svnsync. There is a serious disadvantage to this method: every time something is to be committed, a svn relocate to the master repository has to be done, remembering to svn relocate back to the mirror after the commit. Also, since svn relocate only works between repositories that have the same UUID, some hacking of the local repository's UUID has to occur before it is possible to start using it. The hassle of a local svnsync mirror probably is not worth it unless the network connectivity situation or other factors demand it. If it is needed, see the end of this chapter for information on how to set one up. <literal>RELENG_*</literal> Branches and General Layout In svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base, base refers to the source tree. Similarly, ports refers to the ports tree, and so on. These are separate repositories with their own change number sequences, access controls and commit mail. For the base repository, HEAD refers to the -CURRENT tree. For example, head/bin/ls is what would go into /usr/src/bin/ls in a release. Some key locations are: /head/ which corresponds to HEAD, also known as -CURRENT. /stable/n which corresponds to RELENG_n. /releng/n.n which corresponds to RELENG_n_n. /release/n.n.n which corresponds to RELENG_n_n_n_RELEASE. /vendor* is the vendor branch import work area. This directory itself does not contain branches, however its subdirectories do. This contrasts with the stable, releng and release directories. /projects and /user feature a branch work area, like in Perforce. As above, the /user directory does not contain branches itself. &os; Documentation Project Branches and Layout In svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/doc, doc refers to the repository root of the source tree. In general, most &os; Documentation Project work will be done within the head/ branch of the documentation source tree. &os; documentation is written and/or translated to various languages, each in a separate directory in the head/ branch. Each translation set contains several subdirectories for the various parts of the &os; Documentation Project. A few noteworthy directories are: /articles/ contains the source code for articles written by various &os; contributors. /books/ contains the source code for the different books, such as the &os; Handbook. /htdocs/ contains the source code for the &os; website. &os; Ports Tree Branches and Layout In svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/ports, ports refers to the repository root of the ports tree. In general, most &os; port work will be done within the head/ branch of the ports tree which is the actual ports tree used to install software. Some other key locations are: /branches/RELENG_n_n_n which corresponds to RELENG_n_n_n is used to merge back security updates in preparation for a release. /tags/RELEASE_n_n_n which corresponds to RELEASE_n_n_n represents a release tag of the ports tree. /tags/RELEASE_n_EOL represents the end of life tag of a specific &os; branch. Daily Use This section will explain how to perform common day-to-day operations with Subversion. Help SVN has built in help documentation. It can be accessed by typing: &prompt.user; svn help Additional information can be found in the Subversion Book. Checkout As seen earlier, to check out the &os; head branch: &prompt.user; svn checkout svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/head /usr/src At some point, more than just HEAD will probably be useful, for instance when merging changes to stable/7. Therefore, it may be useful to have a partial checkout of the complete tree (a full checkout would be very painful). To do this, first check out the root of the repository: &prompt.user; svn checkout --depth=immediates svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base This will give base with all the files it contains (at the time of writing, just ROADMAP.txt) and empty subdirectories for head, stable, vendor and so on. Expanding the working copy is possible. Just change the depth of the various subdirectories: &prompt.user; svn up --set-depth=infinity base/head &prompt.user; svn up --set-depth=immediates base/release base/releng base/stable The above command will pull down a full copy of head, plus empty copies of every release tag, every releng branch, and every stable branch. If at a later date merging to 7-STABLE is required, expand the working copy: &prompt.user; svn up --set-depth=infinity base/stable/7 Subtrees do not have to be expanded completely. For instance, expanding only stable/7/sys and then later expand the rest of stable/7: &prompt.user; svn up --set-depth=infinity base/stable/7/sys &prompt.user; svn up --set-depth=infinity base/stable/7 Updating the tree with svn update will only update what was previously asked for (in this case, head and stable/7; it will not pull down the whole tree. Decreasing the depth of a working copy is not possible. Anonymous Checkout It is possible to anonymously check out the &os; repository with Subversion. This will give access to a read-only tree that can be updated, but not committed back to the main repository. To do this, use: &prompt.user; svn co https://svn.FreeBSD.org/base/head /usr/src More details on using Subversion this way can be found in Using Subversion. Updating the Tree To update a working copy to either the latest revision, or a specific revision: &prompt.user; svn update &prompt.user; svn update -r12345 Status To view the local changes that have been made to the working copy: &prompt.user; svn status To show local changes and files that are out-of-date do: &prompt.user; svn status --show-updates Editing and Committing Unlike Perforce, SVN does not need to be told in advance about file editing. To commit all changes in the current directory and all subdirectories: &prompt.user; svn commit To commit all changes in, for example, lib/libfetch/ and usr/bin/fetch/ in a single operation: &prompt.user; svn commit lib/libfetch usr/bin/fetch There is also a commit wrapper for the ports tree to handle the properties and sanity checking the changes: &prompt.user; /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/psvn commit Adding and Removing Files Before adding files, get a copy of auto-props.txt + xlink:href="https://people.FreeBSD.org/~peter/auto-props.txt">auto-props.txt (there is also a + xlink:href="https://people.FreeBSD.org/~beat/cvs2svn/auto-props.txt"> ports tree specific version) and add it to ~/.subversion/config according to the instructions in the file. If you added something before reading this, use svn rm --keep-local for just added files, fix your config file and re-add them again. The initial config file is created when you first run a svn command, even something as simple as svn help. Files are added to a SVN repository with svn add. To add a file named foo, edit it, then: &prompt.user; svn add foo Most new source files should include a $&os;$ string near the start of the file. On commit, svn will expand the $&os;$ string, adding the file path, revision number, date and time of commit, and the username of the committer. Files which cannot be modified may be committed without the $&os;$ string. Files can be removed with svn remove: &prompt.user; svn remove foo Subversion does not require deleting the file before using svn rm, and indeed complains if that happens. It is possible to add directories with svn add: &prompt.user; mkdir bar &prompt.user; svn add bar Although svn mkdir makes this easier by combining the creation of the directory and the adding of it: &prompt.user; svn mkdir bar Like files, directories are removed with svn rm. There is no separate command specifically for removing directories. &prompt.user; svn rm bar Copying and Moving Files This command creates a copy of foo.c named bar.c, with the new file also under version control: &prompt.user; svn copy foo.c bar.c The example above is equivalent to: &prompt.user; cp foo.c bar.c &prompt.user; svn add bar.c To move and rename a file: &prompt.user; svn move foo.c bar.c Log and Annotate svn log shows revisions and commit messages, most recent first, for files or directories. When used on a directory, all revisions that affected the directory and files within that directory are shown. svn annotate, or equally svn praise or svn blame, shows the most recent revision number and who committed that revision for each line of a file. Diffs svn diff displays changes to the working copy. Diffs generated by SVN are unified and include new files by default in the diff output. svn diff can show the changes between two revisions of the same file: &prompt.user; svn diff -r179453:179454 ROADMAP.txt It can also show all changes for a specific changeset. This command shows what changes were made to the current directory and all subdirectories in changeset 179454: &prompt.user; svn diff -c179454 . Reverting Local changes (including additions and deletions) can be reverted using svn revert. It does not update out-of-date files, but just replaces them with pristine copies of the original version. Conflicts If an svn update resulted in a merge conflict, Subversion will remember which files have conflicts and refuse to commit any changes to those files until explicitly told that the conflicts have been resolved. The simple, not yet deprecated procedure is: &prompt.user; svn resolved foo However, the preferred procedure is: &prompt.user; svn resolve --accept=working foo The two examples are equivalent. Possible values for --accept are: working: use the version in your working directory (which one presumes has been edited to resolve the conflicts). base: use a pristine copy of the version you had before svn update, discarding your own changes, the conflicting changes, and possibly other intervening changes as well. mine-full: use what you had before svn update, including your own changes, but discarding the conflicting changes, and possibly other intervening changes as well. theirs-full: use the version that was retrieved when you did svn update, discarding your own changes. Advanced Use Sparse Checkouts SVN allows sparse, or partial checkouts of a directory by adding to a svn checkout. Valid arguments to are: empty: the directory itself without any of its contents. files: the directory and any files it contains. immediates: the directory and any files and directories it contains, but none of the subdirectories' contents. infinity: anything. The --depth option applies to many other commands, including svn commit, svn revert, and svn diff. Since --depth is sticky, there is a --set-depth option for svn update that will change the selected depth. Thus, given the working copy produced by the previous example: &prompt.user; cd ~/freebsd &prompt.user; svn update --set-depth=immediates . The above command will populate the working copy in ~/freebsd with ROADMAP.txt and empty subdirectories, and nothing will happen when svn update is executed on the subdirectories. However, this command will set the depth for head (in this case) to infinity, and fully populate it: &prompt.user; svn update --set-depth=infinity head Direct Operation Certain operations can be performed directly on the repository without touching the working copy. Specifically, this applies to any operation that does not require editing a file, including: log, diff mkdir remove, copy, rename propset, propedit, propdel merge Branching is very fast. This command would be used to branch RELENG_8: &prompt.user; svn copy svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/head svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/stable/8 This is equivalent to these commands which take minutes and hours as opposed to seconds, depending on your network connection: &prompt.user; svn checkout --depth=immediates svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base &prompt.user; cd base &prompt.user; svn update --set-depth=infinity head &prompt.user; svn copy head stable/8 &prompt.user; svn commit stable/8 Merging with <acronym>SVN</acronym> This section deals with merging code from one branch to another (typically, from head to a stable branch). In all examples below, $FSVN refers to the location of the &os; Subversion repository, svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/. About Merge Tracking From the user's perspective, merge tracking information (or mergeinfo) is stored in a property called svn:mergeinfo, which is a comma-separated list of revisions and ranges of revisions that have been merged. When set on a file, it applies only to that file. When set on a directory, it applies to that directory and its descendants (files and directories) except for those that have their own svn:mergeinfo. It is not inherited. For instance, stable/6/contrib/openpam/ does not implicitly inherit mergeinfo from stable/6/, or stable/6/contrib/. Doing so would make partial checkouts very hard to manage. Instead, mergeinfo is explicitly propagated down the tree. For merging something into branch/foo/bar/, these rules apply: If branch/foo/bar/ does not already have a mergeinfo record, but a direct ancestor (for instance, branch/foo/) does, then that record will be propagated down to branch/foo/bar/ before information about the current merge is recorded. Information about the current merge will not be propagated back up that ancestor. If a direct descendant of branch/foo/bar/ (for instance, branch/foo/bar/baz/) already has a mergeinfo record, information about the current merge will be propagated down to it. If you consider the case where a revision changes several separate parts of the tree (for example, branch/foo/bar/ and branch/foo/quux/), but you only want to merge some of it (for example, branch/foo/bar/), you will see that these rules make sense. If mergeinfo was propagated up, it would seem like that revision had also been merged to branch/foo/quux/, when in fact it had not been. Selecting the Source and Target Branch When Merging Merging to stable/ branches should originate from head/. For example: &prompt.user; svn merge -c r123456 ^/head/ stable/11 &prompt.user; svn commit stable/11 Note the sections below which outline changes to the target location of the stable/ branch starting with stable/10. Merges to releng/ branches should always originate from the corresponding stable/ branch. For example: &prompt.user; svn merge -c r123456 ^/stable/11 releng/11.0 &prompt.user; svn commit releng/11.0 Committers are only permitted to commit to the releng/ branches during a release cycle after receiving approval from the Release Engineering Team, after which only the Security Officer may commit to a releng/ branch for a Security Advisory or Errata Notice. Selecting the Source and Target for <literal>stable/10</literal> and Newer Starting with the stable/10 branch, all merges are merged to and committed from the root of the branch. All merges look like: &prompt.user; svn merge -c r123456 ^/head/ checkout &prompt.user; svn commit checkout Note that checkout must be a complete checkout of the branch to which the merge occurs. Merges to releng/ branches must always originate from the corresponding stable/ branch. For example: &prompt.user; svn merge -c r123456 ^/stable/10 releng/10.0 Selecting the Source and Target for <literal>stable/9</literal> and Older For stable/9 and earlier, a different strategy was used, distributing mergeinfo around the tree so that merges could be performed without a complete checkout. This procedure proved extremely error-prone, with the convenience of partial checkouts for merges significantly outweighed by the complexity of picking mergeinfo targets. The procedure below describes this now-obsoleted process, which should be used only for merges prior to stable/10. Because of mergeinfo propagation, it is important to choose the source and target for the merge carefully to minimise property changes on unrelated directories. The rules for selecting the merge target (the directory where the changes are being merged to) can be summarized: Never merge directly to a file. Never, ever merge directly to a file. Never, ever, ever merge directly to a file. Changes to kernel code are merged to sys/. For instance, a change to the &man.ichwd.4; driver is merged to sys/, not sys/dev/ichwd/. Likewise, a change to the TCP/IP stack is merged to sys/, not sys/netinet/. Changes to code under etc/ is merged at etc/, not below it. Changes to vendor code (code in contrib/, crypto/ and so on) are merged to the directory where vendor imports happen. For instance, a change to crypto/openssl/util/ is merged to crypto/openssl/. This is rarely an issue, however, since changes to vendor code are usually merged wholesale. Changes to userland programs should as a general rule be merged to the directory that contains the Makefile for that program. For instance, a change to usr.bin/xlint/arch/i386/ is merged to usr.bin/xlint/. Changes to userland libraries should as a general rule be merged to the directory that contains the Makefile for that library. For instance, a change to lib/libc/gen/ should be merged to lib/libc/. There may be cases where it makes sense to deviate from the rules for userland programs and libraries. For instance, everything under lib/libpam/ is merged to lib/libpam/, even though the library itself and all of the modules each have their own Makefile. Changes to manual pages are merged to share/man/manN/, for the appropriate value of N. Other changes to share/ are merged to the appropriate subdirectory and not to share/ directly. Changes to a top-level file in the source tree such as UPDATING or Makefile.inc1 are merged directly to that file rather than to the root of the whole tree. Yes, this is an exception to the first three rules. When in doubt, ask. If a merge changes several places at once (for instance, changing a kernel interface and every userland program that uses it), merge each target separately, then commit them together. For instance, if merging a revision that changed a kernel API and updated all the userland bits that used that API, merge the kernel change to sys, and the userland bits to the appropriate userland directories, then commit all of these in one go. The source will almost invariably be the same as the target. For instance, always merge stable/7/lib/libc/ from head/lib/libc/. The only exception would be when merging changes to code that has moved in the source branch but not in the parent branch. For instance, a change to &man.pkill.1; would be merged from bin/pkill/ in head to usr.bin/pkill/ in stable/7. Preparing the Merge Target Because of the mergeinfo propagation issues described earlier, it is very important to never merge changes into a sparse working copy. Always use a full checkout of the branch being merged into. For instance, when merging from HEAD to 7, use a full checkout of stable/7: &prompt.user; cd stable/7 &prompt.user; svn up --set-depth=infinity The target directory must also be up-to-date and must not contain any uncommitted changes or stray files. Identifying Revisions Identifying revisions to be merged is a must. If the target already has complete mergeinfo, ask SVN for a list: &prompt.user; cd stable/6/contrib/openpam &prompt.user; svn mergeinfo --show-revs=eligible $FSVN/head/contrib/openpam If the target does not have complete mergeinfo, check the log for the merge source. Merging Now, let us start merging! The Principles For example, To merge: revision $R in directory $target in stable branch $B from directory $source in head $FSVN is svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base Assuming that revisions $P and $Q have already been merged, and that the current directory is an up-to-date working copy of stable/$B, the existing mergeinfo looks like this: &prompt.user; svn propget svn:mergeinfo -R $target $target - /head/$source:$P,$Q Merging is done like so: &prompt.user; svn merge -c$R $FSVN/head/$source $target Checking the results of this is possible with svn diff. The svn:mergeinfo now looks like: &prompt.user; svn propget svn:mergeinfo -R $target $target - head/$source:$P,$Q,$R If the results are not exactly as shown, assistance may be required before committing as mistakes may have been made, or there may be something wrong with the existing mergeinfo, or there may be a bug in Subversion. Practical Example As a practical example, consider this scenario. The changes to netmap.4 in r238987 are to be merged from CURRENT to 9-STABLE. The file resides in head/share/man/man4. According to , this is also where to do the merge. Note that in this example all paths are relative to the top of the svn repository. For more information on the directory layout, see . The first step is to inspect the existing mergeinfo. &prompt.user; svn propget svn:mergeinfo -R stable/9/share/man/man4 Take a quick note of how it looks before moving on to the next step; doing the actual merge: &prompt.user; svn merge -c r238987 svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/head/share/man/man4 stable/9/share/man/man4 --- Merging r238987 into 'stable/9/share/man/man4': U stable/9/share/man/man4/netmap.4 --- Recording mergeinfo for merge of r238987 into 'stable/9/share/man/man4': U stable/9/share/man/man4 Check that the revision number of the merged revision has been added. Once this is verified, the only thing left is the actual commit. &prompt.user; svn commit stable/9/share/man/man4 Merging into the Kernel (<filename>sys/</filename>) As stated above, merging into the kernel is different from merging in the rest of the tree. In many ways merging to the kernel is simpler because there is always the same merge target (sys/). Once svn merge has been executed, svn diff has to be run on the directory to check the changes. This may show some unrelated property changes, but these can be ignored. Next, build and test the kernel, and, once the tests are complete, commit the code as normal, making sure that the commit message starts with Merge r226222 from head, or similar. Precautions Before Committing As always, build world (or appropriate parts of it). Check the changes with svn diff and svn stat. Make sure all the files that should have been added or deleted were in fact added or deleted. Take a closer look at any property change (marked by a M in the second column of svn stat). Normally, no svn:mergeinfo properties should be anywhere except the target directory (or directories). If something looks fishy, ask for help. Committing Make sure to commit a top level directory to have the mergeinfo included as well. Do not specify individual files on the command line. For more information about committing files in general, see the relevant section of this primer. Vendor Imports with <acronym>SVN</acronym> Please read this entire section before starting a vendor import. Patches to vendor code fall into two categories: Vendor patches: these are patches that have been issued by the vendor, or that have been extracted from the vendor's version control system, which address issues which cannot wait until the next vendor release. &os; patches: these are patches that modify the vendor code to address &os;-specific issues. The nature of a patch dictates where it should be committed: Vendor patches must be committed to the vendor branch, and merged from there to head. If the patch addresses an issue in a new release that is currently being imported, it must not be committed along with the new release: the release must be imported and tagged first, then the patch can be applied and committed. There is no need to re-tag the vendor sources after committing the patch. &os; patches are committed directly to head. Preparing the Tree If importing for the first time after the switch to Subversion, flattening and cleaning up the vendor tree is necessary, as well as bootstrapping the merge history in the main tree. Flattening During the conversion from CVS to Subversion, vendor branches were imported with the same layout as the main tree. This means that the pf vendor sources ended up in vendor/pf/dist/contrib/pf. The vendor source is best directly in vendor/pf/dist. To flatten the pf tree: &prompt.user; cd vendor/pf/dist/contrib/pf &prompt.user; svn mv $(svn list) ../.. &prompt.user; cd ../.. &prompt.user; svn rm contrib &prompt.user; svn propdel -R svn:mergeinfo . &prompt.user; svn commit The propdel bit is necessary because starting with 1.5, Subversion will automatically add svn:mergeinfo to any directory that is copied or moved. In this case, as nothing is being merged from the deleted tree, they just get in the way. Tags may be flattened as well (3, 4, 3.5 etc.); the procedure is exactly the same, only changing dist to 3.5 or similar, and putting the svn commit off until the end of the process. Cleaning Up The dist tree can be cleaned up as necessary. Disabling keyword expansion is recommended, as it makes no sense on unmodified vendor code and in some cases it can even be harmful. OpenSSH, for example, includes two files that originated with &os; and still contain the original version tags. To do this: &prompt.user; svn propdel svn:keywords -R . &prompt.user; svn commit Bootstrapping Merge History If importing for the first time after the switch to Subversion, bootstrap svn:mergeinfo on the target directory in the main tree to the revision that corresponds to the last related change to the vendor tree, prior to importing new sources: &prompt.user; cd head/contrib/pf &prompt.user; svn merge --record-only svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/vendor/pf/dist@180876 . &prompt.user; svn commit Importing New Sources With two commits—one for the import itself and one for the tag—this step can optionally be repeated for every upstream release between the last import and the current import. Preparing the Vendor Sources Unlike in CVS where only the needed parts were imported into the vendor tree to avoid bloating the main tree, Subversion is able to store a full distribution in the vendor tree. So, import everything, but merge only what is required. A svn add is required to add any files that were added since the last vendor import, and svn rm is required to remove any that were removed since. Preparing sorted lists of the contents of the vendor tree and of the sources that are about to be imported is recommended, to facilitate the process. &prompt.user; cd vendor/pf/dist &prompt.user; svn list -R | grep -v '/$' | sort >../old &prompt.user; cd ../pf-4.3 &prompt.user; find . -type f | cut -c 3- | sort >../new With these two files, comm -23 ../old ../new will list removed files (files only in old), while comm -13 ../old ../new will list added files only in new. Importing into the Vendor Tree Now, the sources must be copied into dist and the svn add and svn rm commands are used as needed: &prompt.user; cd vendor/pf/pf-4.3 &prompt.user; tar cf - . | tar xf - -C ../dist &prompt.user; cd ../dist &prompt.user; comm -23 ../old ../new | xargs svn rm &prompt.user; comm -13 ../old ../new | xargs svn --parents add If any directories were removed, they will have to be svn rmed manually. Nothing will break if they are not, but they will remain in the tree. Check properties on any new files. All text files should have svn:eol-style set to native. All binary files should have svn:mime-type set to application/octet-stream unless there is a more appropriate media type. Executable files should have svn:executable set to *. No other properties should exist on any file in the tree. Committing is now possible. However, it is good practice to make sure that everything is okay by using the svn stat and svn diff commands. Tagging Once committed, vendor releases are tagged for future reference. The best and quickest way to do this is directly in the repository: &prompt.user; svn cp svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/vendor/pf/dist svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/vendor/pf/4.3 Once that is complete, svn up the working copy of vendor/pf to get the new tag, although this is rarely needed. If creating the tag in the working copy of the tree, svn:mergeinfo results must be removed: &prompt.user; cd vendor/pf &prompt.user; svn cp dist 4.3 &prompt.user; svn propdel svn:mergeinfo -R 4.3 Merging to Head &prompt.user; cd head/contrib/pf &prompt.user; svn up &prompt.user; svn merge --accept=postpone svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/vendor/pf/dist . The --accept=postpone tells Subversion not to complain about merge conflicts as they will be handled manually. The cvs2svn changeover occurred on June 3, 2008. When performing vendor merges for packages which were already present and converted by the cvs2svn process, the command used to merge /vendor/package_name/dist to /head/package_location (for example, head/contrib/sendmail) must use to indicate the revision to merge from the /vendor tree. For example: &prompt.user; svn checkout svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/head/contrib/sendmail &prompt.user; cd sendmail &prompt.user; svn merge -c r261190 ^/vendor/sendmail/dist . ^ is an alias for the repository path. If using the Zsh shell, the ^ must be escaped with \. This means ^/head should be \^/head. It is necessary to resolve any merge conflicts. Make sure that any files that were added or removed in the vendor tree have been properly added or removed in the main tree. To check diffs against the vendor branch: &prompt.user; svn diff --no-diff-deleted --old=svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/vendor/pf/dist --new=. The --no-diff-deleted tells Subversion not to complain about files that are in the vendor tree but not in the main tree. Things that would have previously been removed before the vendor import, like the vendor's makefiles and configure scripts. Using CVS, once a file was off the vendor branch, it was not able to be put back. With Subversion, there is no concept of on or off the vendor branch. If a file that previously had local modifications, to make it not show up in diffs in the vendor tree, all that has to be done is remove any left-over cruft like &os; version tags, which is much easier. If any changes are required for the world to build with the new sources, make them now, and keep testing until everything builds and runs perfectly. Committing the Vendor Import Committing is now possible! Everything must be committed in one go. If done properly, the tree will move from a consistent state with old code, to a consistent state with new code. From Scratch Importing into the Vendor Tree This section is an example of importing and tagging byacc into head. First, prepare the directory in vendor: &prompt.user; svn co --depth immediates $FSVN/vendor &prompt.user; cd vendor &prompt.user; svn mkdir byacc &prompt.user; svn mkdir byacc/dist Now, import the sources into the dist directory. Once the files are in place, svn add the new ones, then svn commit and tag the imported version. To save time and bandwidth, direct remote committing and tagging is possible: &prompt.user; svn cp -m "Tag byacc 20120115" $FSVN/vendor/byacc/dist $FSVN/vendor/byacc/20120115 Merging to <literal>head</literal> Due to this being a new file, copy it for the merge: &prompt.user; svn cp -m "Import byacc to contrib" $FSVN/vendor/byacc/dist $FSVN/head/contrib/byacc Working normally on newly imported sources is still possible. Reverting a Commit Reverting a commit to a previous version is fairly easy: &prompt.user; svn merge -r179454:179453 ROADMAP.txt &prompt.user; svn commit Change number syntax, with negative meaning a reverse change, can also be used: &prompt.user; svn merge -c -179454 ROADMAP.txt &prompt.user; svn commit This can also be done directly in the repository: &prompt.user; svn merge -r179454:179453 svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/ROADMAP.txt It is important to ensure that the mergeinfo is correct when reverting a file to permit svn mergeinfo --eligible to work as expected. Reverting the deletion of a file is slightly different. Copying the version of the file that predates the deletion is required. For example, to restore a file that was deleted in revision N, restore version N-1: &prompt.user; svn copy svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/ROADMAP.txt@179454 &prompt.user; svn commit or, equally: &prompt.user; svn copy svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/ROADMAP.txt@179454 svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base Do not simply recreate the file manually and svn add it—this will cause history to be lost. Fixing Mistakes While we can do surgery in an emergency, do not plan on having mistakes fixed behind the scenes. Plan on mistakes remaining in the logs forever. Be sure to check the output of svn status and svn diff before committing. Mistakes will happen but, they can generally be fixed without disruption. Take a case of adding a file in the wrong location. The right thing to do is to svn move the file to the correct location and commit. This causes just a couple of lines of metadata in the repository journal, and the logs are all linked up correctly. The wrong thing to do is to delete the file and then svn add an independent copy in the correct location. Instead of a couple of lines of text, the repository journal grows an entire new copy of the file. This is a waste. Setting up a <application>svnsync</application> Mirror Avoid setting up a svnsync mirror unless there is a very good reason for it. Such reasons might be to support multiple local read-only client machines, or if the network bandwidth is limited. Starting a fresh mirror from empty would take a very long time. Expect a minimum of 10 hours for high speed connectivity. If international links are involved, expect this to take four to ten times longer. A far better option is to grab a seed file. It is large (~1GB) but will consume less network traffic and take less time to fetch than a svnsync will. There are several ways to do this: &prompt.user; rsync -va --partial --progress freefall:/home/peter/svnmirror-base-r179637.tbz2 . &prompt.user; rsync -va --partial --progress rsync://repoman.freebsd.org:50873/svnseed/svnmirror-base-r215629.tar.xz . &prompt.user; fetch ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/development/subversion/svnmirror-base-r221445.tar.xz Extract the file to somewhere like home/svnmirror/base/. Then, update it, so that it fetches changes since the last revision in the archive: &prompt.user; svnsync sync file:///home/svnmirror/base Now, set that up to run from &man.cron.8;, do checkouts locally, set up a svnserve server for local machines to talk to, etc. The seed mirror is set to fetch from svn://svn.freebsd.org/base. The configuration for the mirror is stored in revprop 0 on the local mirror. To see the configuration, try: &prompt.user; svn proplist -v --revprop -r 0 file:///home/svnmirror/base Use propset to change things. Committing High-<acronym>ASCII</acronym> Data Files that have high-ASCII bits are considered binary files in SVN, so the pre-commit checks fail and indicate that the mime-type property should be set to application/octet-stream. However, the use of this is discouraged, so please do not set it. The best way is always avoiding high-ASCII data, so that it can be read everywhere with any text editor but if it is not avoidable, instead of changing the mime-type, set the fbsd:notbinary property with propset: &prompt.user; svn propset fbsd:notbinary yes foo.data Maintaining a Project Branch A project branch is one that is synced to head (or another branch) is used to develop a project then commit it back to head. In SVN, dolphin branching is used for this. A dolphin branch is one that diverges for a while and is finally committed back to the original branch. During development code migration in one direction (from head to the branch only). No code is committed back to head until the end. Once the branch is commited back at the end, it is dead (although a new branch with the same name can be created after the dead one was deleted). As per http://people.freebsd.org/~peter/svn_notes.txt, + xlink:href="https://people.FreeBSD.org/~peter/svn_notes.txt">https://people.FreeBSD.org/~peter/svn_notes.txt, work that is intended to be merged back into HEAD should be in base/projects/. If the work is beneficial to the &os; community in some way but not intended to be merged directly back into HEAD then the proper location is base/user/username/. This page contains further details. To create a project branch: &prompt.user; svn copy svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/head svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/projects/spif To merge changes from HEAD back into the project branch: &prompt.user; cd copy_of_spif &prompt.user; svn merge svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/base/head &prompt.user; svn commit It is important to resolve any merge conflicts before committing. Some Tips In commit logs etc., rev 179872 is spelled r179872 as per convention. Speeding up svn is possible by adding these entries to ~/.ssh/config: Host * ControlPath ~/.ssh/sockets/master-%l-%r@%h:%p ControlMaster auto ControlPersist yes and then typing mkdir ~/.ssh/sockets Checking out a working copy with a stock Subversion client without &os;-specific patches (OPTIONS_SET=FREEBSD_TEMPLATE) will mean that $FreeBSD$ tags will not be expanded. Once the correct version has been installed, trick Subversion into expanding them like so: &prompt.user; svn propdel -R svn:keywords . &prompt.user; svn revert -R . This will wipe out uncommitted patches. It is possible to automatically fill the "Sponsored by" and "MFC after" commit log fields by setting "freebsd-sponsored-by" and "freebsd-mfc-after" fields in the "[miscellany]" section of the ~/.subversion/config configuration file. For example: freebsd-sponsored-by = The FreeBSD Foundation freebsd-mfc-after = 2 weeks Setup, Conventions, and Traditions There are a number of things to do as a new developer. The first set of steps is specific to committers only. These steps must be done by a mentor for those who are not committers. For New Committers Those who have been given commit rights to the &os; repositories must follow these steps. Get mentor approval before committing each of these changes! The .ent and .xml files mentioned below exist in the &os; Documentation Project SVN repository at svn+ssh://repo.FreeBSD.org/doc/. New files that do not have the FreeBSD=%H svn:keywords property will be rejected when attempting to commit them to the repository. Be sure to read regarding adding and removing files. Verify that ~/.subversion/config contains the necessary auto-props entries from auto-props.txt mentioned there. All src commits go to &os.current; first before being merged to &os.stable;. The &os.stable; branch must maintain ABI and API compatibility with earlier versions of that branch. Do not merge changes that break this compatibility. Steps for New Committers Add an Author Entity doc/head/share/xml/authors.ent — Add an author entity. Later steps depend on this entity, and missing this step will cause the doc/ build to fail. This is a relatively easy task, but remains a good first test of version control skills. Update the List of Developers and Contributors doc/head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/contrib.committers.xml — Add an entry to the Developers section of the Contributors List. Entries are sorted by last name. doc/head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/contrib.additional.xml — Remove the entry from the Additional Contributors section. Entries are sorted by first name. Add a News Item doc/head/share/xml/news.xml — Add an entry. Look for the other entries that announce new committers and follow the format. Use the date from the commit bit approval email from core@FreeBSD.org. Add a <acronym>PGP</acronym> Key doc/head/share/pgpkeys/pgpkeys.ent and doc/head/share/pgpkeys/pgpkeys-developers.xml - Add your PGP or GnuPG key. Those who do not yet have a key should see . &a.des.email; has written a shell script (doc/head/share/pgpkeys/addkey.sh) to make this easier. See the README file for more information. Use doc/head/share/pgpkeys/checkkey.sh to verify that keys meet minimal best-practices standards. After adding and checking a key, add both updated files to source control and then commit them. Entries in this file are sorted by last name. It is very important to have a current PGP/GnuPG key in the repository. The key may be required for positive identification of a committer. For example, the &a.admins; might need it for account recovery. A complete keyring of FreeBSD.org users is available for download from https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/pgpkeyring.txt. Update Mentor and Mentee Information base/head/share/misc/committers-repository.dot — Add an entry to the current committers section, where repository is doc, ports, or src, depending on the commit privileges granted. Add an entry for each additional mentor/mentee relationship in the bottom section. Generate a <application>Kerberos</application> Password See to generate or set a Kerberos for use with other &os; services like the bug tracking database. Optional: Enable Wiki Account &os; Wiki Account — A wiki account allows sharing projects and ideas. Those who do not yet have an account can contact clusteradm@FreeBSD.org to obtain one. Optional: Update Wiki Information Wiki Information - After gaining access to the wiki, some people add entries to the How We Got Here, Irc Nicks, and Dogs of FreeBSD pages. Optional: Update Ports with Personal Information ports/astro/xearth/files/freebsd.committers.markers and src/usr.bin/calendar/calendars/calendar.freebsd - Some people add entries for themselves to these files to show where they are located or the date of their birthday. Optional: Prevent Duplicate Mailings Subscribers to &a.svn-src-all.name;, &a.svn-ports-all.name; or &a.svn-doc-all.name; might wish to unsubscribe to avoid receiving duplicate copies of commit messages and followups. For Everyone Introduce yourself to the other developers, otherwise no one will have any idea who you are or what you are working on. The introduction need not be a comprehensive biography, just write a paragraph or two about who you are, what you plan to be working on as a developer in &os;, and who will be your mentor. Email this to the &a.developers; and you will be on your way! Log into freefall.FreeBSD.org and create a /var/forward/user (where user is your username) file containing the e-mail address where you want mail addressed to yourusername@FreeBSD.org to be forwarded. This includes all of the commit messages as well as any other mail addressed to the &a.committers; and the &a.developers;. Really large mailboxes which have taken up permanent residence on freefall may get truncated without warning if space needs to be freed, so forward it or save it elsewhere. Due to the severe load dealing with SPAM places on the central mail servers that do the mailing list processing, the front-end server does do some basic checks and will drop some messages based on these checks. At the moment proper DNS information for the connecting host is the only check in place but that may change. Some people blame these checks for bouncing valid email. To have these checks turned off for your email, create a file named ~/.spam_lover on freefall.FreeBSD.org. Those who are developers but not committers will not be subscribed to the committers or developers mailing lists. The subscriptions are derived from the access rights. Mentors All new developers have a mentor assigned to them for the first few months. A mentor is responsible for teaching the mentee the rules and conventions of the project and guiding their first steps in the developer community. The mentor is also personally responsible for the mentee's actions during this initial period. For committers: do not commit anything without first getting mentor approval. Document that approval with an Approved by: line in the commit message. When the mentor decides that a mentee has learned the ropes and is ready to commit on their own, the mentor announces it with a commit to conf/mentors. This file is in the svnadmin branch of each repository: src base/svnadmin/conf/mentors doc doc/svnadmin/conf/mentors ports ports/svnadmin/conf/mentors Commit Log Messages This section contains some suggestions and traditions for how commit logs are formatted. As well as including an informative message with each commit, some additional information may be needed. This information consists of one or more lines containing the key word or phrase, a colon, tabs for formatting, and then the additional information. The key words or phrases are: PR: The problem report (if any) which is affected (typically, by being closed) by this commit. Multiple PRs may be specified on one line, separated by commas or spaces. Submitted by: The name and e-mail address of the person that submitted the fix; for developers, just the username on the &os; cluster. If the submitter is the maintainer of the port being committed, include "(maintainer)" after the email address. Avoid obfuscating the email address of the submitter as this adds additional work when searching logs. Reviewed by: The name and e-mail address of the person or people that reviewed the change; for developers, just the username on the &os; cluster. If a patch was submitted to a mailing list for review, and the review was favorable, then just include the list name. Approved by: The name and e-mail address of the person or people that approved the change; for developers, just the username on the &os; cluster. It is customary to get prior approval for a commit if it is to an area of the tree to which you do not usually commit. In addition, during the run up to a new release all commits must be approved by the release engineering team. While under mentorship, get mentor approval before the commit. Enter the mentor's username in this field, and note that they are a mentor: Approved by: username-of-mentor (mentor) If a team approved these commits then include the team name followed by the username of the approver in parentheses. For example: Approved by: re (username) Obtained from: The name of the project (if any) from which the code was obtained. Do not use this line for the name of an individual person. MFC after: If you wish to receive an e-mail reminder to MFC at a later date, specify the number of days, weeks, or months after which an MFC is planned. MFC to: If the commit should be merged to a subset of stable branches, specify the branch names. MFC with: If the commit should be merged together with a previous one in a single MFC commit (for example, where this commit corrects a bug in the previous change), specify the corresponding revision number. Relnotes: If the change is a candidate for inclusion in the release notes for the next release from the branch, set to yes. Security: If the change is related to a security vulnerability or security exposure, include one or more references or a description of the issue. If possible, include a VuXML URL or a CVE ID. Differential Revision: The full URL of the Phabricator review. This line must be the last line. For example: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D1708. Commit Log for a Commit Based on a PR The commit is based on a patch from a PR submitted by John Smith. The commit message PR and Submitted by fields are filled.. ... PR: 12345 Submitted by: John Smith <John.Smith@example.com> Commit Log for a Commit Needing Review The virtual memory system is being changed. After posting patches to the appropriate mailing list (in this case, freebsd-arch) and the changes have been approved. ... Reviewed by: -arch Commit Log for a Commit Needing Approval Commit a port, after working with the listed MAINTAINER, who said to go ahead and commit. ... Approved by: abc (maintainer) Where abc is the account name of the person who approved. Commit Log for a Commit Bringing in Code from OpenBSD Commiting some code based on work done in the OpenBSD project. ... Obtained from: OpenBSD Commit Log for a Change to &os.current; with a Planned Commit to &os.stable; to Follow at a Later Date. Committing some code which will be merged from &os.current; into the &os.stable; branch after two weeks. ... MFC after: 2 weeks Where 2 is the number of days, weeks, or months after which an MFC is planned. The weeks option may be day, days, week, weeks, month, months. It is often necessary to combine these. Consider the situation where a user has submitted a PR containing code from the NetBSD project. Looking at the PR, the developer sees it is not an area of the tree they normally work in, so they have the change reviewed by the arch mailing list. Since the change is complex, the developer opts to MFC after one month to allow adequate testing. The extra information to include in the commit would look something like Example Combined Commit Log PR: 54321 Submitted by: John Smith <John.Smith@example.com> Reviewed by: -arch Obtained from: NetBSD MFC after: 1 month Relnotes: yes Preferred License for New Files The &os; Project suggests and uses this text as the preferred license scheme: /*- * Copyright (c) [year] [your name] * All rights reserved. * * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions * are met: * 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * * THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND * ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE * IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE * ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE * FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL * DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS * OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) * HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT * LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY * OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF * SUCH DAMAGE. * * [id for your version control system, if any] */ The &os; project strongly discourages the so-called "advertising clause" in new code. Due to the large number of contributors to the &os; project, complying with this clause for many commercial vendors has become difficult. If you have code in the tree with the advertising clause, please consider removing it. In fact, please consider using the above license for your code. The &os; project discourages completely new licenses and variations on the standard licenses. New licenses require the approval of the &a.core; to reside in the main repository. The more different licenses that are used in the tree, the more problems that this causes to those wishing to utilize this code, typically from unintended consequences from a poorly worded license. Project policy dictates that code under some non-BSD licenses must be placed only in specific sections of the repository, and in some cases, compilation must be conditional or even disabled by default. For example, the GENERIC kernel must be compiled under only licenses identical to or substantially similar to the BSD license. GPL, APSL, CDDL, etc, licensed software must not be compiled into GENERIC. Developers are reminded that in open source, getting "open" right is just as important as getting "source" right, as improper handling of intellectual property has serious consequences. Any questions or concerns should immediately be brought to the attention of the core team. Keeping Track of Licenses Granted to the &os; Project Various software or data exist in the repositories where the &os; project has been granted a special licence to be able to use them. A case in point are the Terminus fonts for use with &man.vt.4;. Here the author Dimitar Zhekov has allowed us to use the "Terminus BSD Console" font under a 2-clause BSD license rather than the regular Open Font License he normally uses. It is clearly sensible to keep a record of any such license grants. To that end, the &a.core; has decided to keep an archive of them. Whenever the &os; project is granted a special license we require the &a.core; to be notified. Any developers involved in arranging such a license grant, please send details to the &a.core; including: Contact details for people or organizations granting the special license. What files, directories etc. in the repositories are covered by the license grant including the revision numbers where any specially licensed material was committed. The date the license comes into effect from. Unless otherwise agreed, this will be the date the license was issued by the authors of the software in question. The license text. A note of any restrictions, limitations or exceptions that apply specifically to &os;'s usage of the licensed material. Any other relevant information. Once the &a.core; is satisfied that all the necessary details have been gathered and are correct, the secretary will send a PGP-signed acknowledgement of receipt including the license details. This receipt will be persistently archived and serve as our permanent record of the license grant. The license archive should contain only details of license grants; this is not the place for any discussions around licensing or other subjects. Access to data within the license archive will be available on request to the &a.core;. Developer Relations When working directly on your own code or on code which is already well established as your responsibility, then there is probably little need to check with other committers before jumping in with a commit. Working on a bug in an area of the system which is clearly orphaned (and there are a few such areas, to our shame), the same applies. Trying to modify something which is clearly being actively maintained by someone else (and it is only by watching the repository-committers mailing list that a developer can really get a feel for just what is and is not) then consider sending the change to them instead, just as a developer would have before becoming a committer. For ports, contact the listed MAINTAINER in the Makefile. For other parts of the repository, if it is not clear who the active maintainer is, it may help to scan the revision history to see who has committed changes in the past. An example script that lists each person who has committed to a given file along with the number of commits each person has made can be found at on freefall at ~eadler/bin/whodid. If queries go unanswered or the committer otherwise indicates a lack of interest in the area affected, go ahead and commit it. Avoid sending private emails to maintainers. Other people might be interested in the conversation, not just the final output. If there is any doubt about a commit for any reason at all, have it reviewed by -hackers before committing. Better to have it flamed then and there rather than when it is part of the repository. If a commit does results in controversy erupting, it may be advisable to consider backing the change out again until the matter is settled. Remember, with a version control system we can always change it back. Do not impugn the intentions of others. If they see a different solution to a problem, or even a different problem, it is probably not because they are stupid, because they have questionable parentage, or because they are trying to destroy hard work, personal image, or &os;, but basically because they have a different outlook on the world. Different is good. Disagree honestly. Argue your position from its merits, be honest about any shortcomings it may have, and be open to seeing their solution, or even their vision of the problem, with an open mind. Accept correction. We are all fallible. When you have made a mistake, apologize and get on with life. Do not beat up yourself, and certainly do not beat up others for your mistake. Do not waste time on embarrassment or recrimination, just fix the problem and move on. Ask for help. Seek out (and give) peer reviews. One of the ways open source software is supposed to excel is in the number of eyeballs applied to it; this does not apply if nobody will review code. If in Doubt... When unsure about something, whether it be a technical issue or a project convention be sure to ask. If you stay silent you will never make progress. If it relates to a technical issue ask on the public mailing lists. Avoid the temptation to email the individual person that knows the answer. This way everyone will be able to learn from the question and the answer. For project specific or administrative questions ask, in order: Your mentor or former mentor. An experienced committer on IRC, email, etc. Any team with a "hat", as they can give you a definitive answer. If still not sure, ask on &a.developers;. Once your question is answered, if no one pointed you to documentation that spelled out the answer to your question, document it, as others will have the same question. Bugzilla The &os; Project utilizes Bugzilla for tracking bugs and change requests. Be sure that if you commit a fix or suggestion found in the PR database to close it. It is also considered nice if you take time to close any PRs associated with your commits, if appropriate. Committers with non-&os;.org Bugzilla accounts can have the old account merged with the &os;.org account by entering a new bug. Choose Supporting Services as the Product, and Bug Tracker as the Component. You can find out more about Bugzilla at: &os; Problem Report Handling Guidelines https://www.FreeBSD.org/support.html Phabricator The &os; Project utilizes Phabricator for code review requests. See the CodeReview wiki page for details. Who's Who Besides the repository meisters, there are other &os; project members and teams whom you will probably get to know in your role as a committer. Briefly, and by no means all-inclusively, these are: &a.doceng; doceng is the group responsible for the documentation build infrastructure, approving new documentation committers, and ensuring that the &os; website and documentation on the FTP site is up to date with respect to the subversion tree. It is not a conflict resolution body. The vast majority of documentation related discussion takes place on the &a.doc;. More details regarding the doceng team can be found in its charter. Committers interested in contributing to the documentation should familiarize themselves with the Documentation Project Primer. &a.bde.email; Bruce is the Style Police-Meister. When you do a commit that could have been done better, Bruce will be there to tell you. Be thankful that someone is. Bruce is also very knowledgeable on the various standards applicable to &os;. &a.re.members.email; These are the members of the &a.re;. This team is responsible for setting release deadlines and controlling the release process. During code freezes, the release engineers have final authority on all changes to the system for whichever branch is pending release status. If there is something you want merged from &os.current; to &os.stable; (whatever values those may have at any given time), these are the people to talk to about it. Hiroki is also the keeper of the release documentation (src/release/doc/*). If you commit a change that you think is worthy of mention in the release notes, please make sure he knows about it. Better still, send him a patch with your suggested commentary. &a.so.email; &a.so; is the &os; Security Officer and oversees the &a.security-officer;. &a.wollman.email; If you need advice on obscure network internals or are not sure of some potential change to the networking subsystem you have in mind, Garrett is someone to talk to. Garrett is also very knowledgeable on the various standards applicable to &os;. &a.committers; &a.svn-src-all.name;, &a.svn-ports-all.name; and &a.svn-doc-all.name; are the mailing lists that the version control system uses to send commit messages to. Never send email directly to these lists. Only send replies to this list when they are short and are directly related to a commit. &a.developers; All committers are subscribed to -developers. This list was created to be a forum for the committers community issues. Examples are Core voting, announcements, etc. The &a.developers; is for the exclusive use of &os; committers. To develop &os;, committers must have the ability to openly discuss matters that will be resolved before they are publicly announced. Frank discussions of work in progress are not suitable for open publication and may harm &os;. All &os; committers are expected not to not publish or forward messages from the &a.developers; outside the list membership without permission of all of the authors. Violators will be removed from the &a.developers;, resulting in a suspension of commit privileges. Repeated or flagrant violations may result in permanent revocation of commit privileges. This list is not intended as a place for code reviews or for any technical discussion. In fact using it as such hurts the &os; Project as it gives a sense of a closed list where general decisions affecting all of the &os; using community are made without being open. Last, but not least never, never ever, email the &a.developers; and CC:/BCC: another &os; list. Never, ever email another &os; email list and CC:/BCC: the &a.developers;. Doing so can greatly diminish the benefits of this list. SSH Quick-Start Guide If you do not wish to type your password in every time you use &man.ssh.1;, and you use keys to authenticate, &man.ssh-agent.1; is there for your convenience. If you want to use &man.ssh-agent.1;, make sure that you run it before running other applications. X users, for example, usually do this from their .xsession or .xinitrc. See &man.ssh-agent.1; for details. Generate a key pair using &man.ssh-keygen.1;. The key pair will wind up in your $HOME/.ssh/ directory. Only ECDSA, Ed25519 or RSA keys are supported. Send your public key ($HOME/.ssh/id_ecdsa.pub, $HOME/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub, or $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) to the person setting you up as a committer so it can be put into yourlogin in /etc/ssh-keys/ on freefall. Now &man.ssh-add.1; can be used for authentication once per session. It prompts for the private key's pass phrase, and then stores it in the authentication agent (&man.ssh-agent.1;). Use ssh-add -d to remove keys stored in the agent. Test with a simple remote command: ssh freefall.FreeBSD.org ls /usr. For more information, see security/openssh, &man.ssh.1;, &man.ssh-add.1;, &man.ssh-agent.1;, &man.ssh-keygen.1;, and &man.scp.1;. For information on adding, changing, or removing &man.ssh.1; keys, see this article. &coverity; Availability for &os; Committers All &os; developers can obtain access to Coverity analysis results of all &os; Project software. All who are interested in obtaining access to the analysis results of the automated Coverity runs, can sign up at Coverity Scan. The &os; wiki includes a mini-guide for developers who are interested in working with the &coverity; analysis reports: http://wiki.freebsd.org/CoverityPrevent. Please note that this mini-guide is only readable by &os; developers, so if you cannot access this page, you will have to ask someone to add you to the appropriate Wiki access list. Finally, all &os; developers who are going to use &coverity; are always encouraged to ask for more details and usage information, by posting any questions to the mailing list of the &os; developers. The &os; Committers' Big List of Rules Everyone involved with the &os; project is expected to abide by the Code of Conduct available from https://www.FreeBSD.org/internal/code-of-conduct.html. As committers, you form the public face of the project, and how you behave has a vital impact on the public perception of it. This guide expands on the parts of the Code of Conduct specific to committers. Respect other committers. Respect other contributors. Discuss any significant change before committing. Respect existing maintainers (if listed in the MAINTAINER field in Makefile or in MAINTAINER in the top-level directory). Any disputed change must be backed out pending resolution of the dispute if requested by a maintainer. Security related changes may override a maintainer's wishes at the Security Officer's discretion. Changes go to &os.current; before &os.stable; unless specifically permitted by the release engineer or unless they are not applicable to &os.current;. Any non-trivial or non-urgent change which is applicable should also be allowed to sit in &os.current; for at least 3 days before merging so that it can be given sufficient testing. The release engineer has the same authority over the &os.stable; branch as outlined for the maintainer in rule #5. Do not fight in public with other committers; it looks bad. Respect all code freezes and read the committers and developers mailing lists in a timely manner so you know when a code freeze is in effect. When in doubt on any procedure, ask first! Test your changes before committing them. Do not commit to anything under the src/contrib, src/crypto, or src/sys/contrib trees without explicit approval from the respective maintainers. As noted, breaking some of these rules can be grounds for suspension or, upon repeated offense, permanent removal of commit privileges. Individual members of core have the power to temporarily suspend commit privileges until core as a whole has the chance to review the issue. In case of an emergency (a committer doing damage to the repository), a temporary suspension may also be done by the repository meisters. Only a 2/3 majority of core has the authority to suspend commit privileges for longer than a week or to remove them permanently. This rule does not exist to set core up as a bunch of cruel dictators who can dispose of committers as casually as empty soda cans, but to give the project a kind of safety fuse. If someone is out of control, it is important to be able to deal with this immediately rather than be paralyzed by debate. In all cases, a committer whose privileges are suspended or revoked is entitled to a hearing by core, the total duration of the suspension being determined at that time. A committer whose privileges are suspended may also request a review of the decision after 30 days and every 30 days thereafter (unless the total suspension period is less than 30 days). A committer whose privileges have been revoked entirely may request a review after a period of 6 months has elapsed. This review policy is strictly informal and, in all cases, core reserves the right to either act on or disregard requests for review if they feel their original decision to be the right one. In all other aspects of project operation, core is a subset of committers and is bound by the same rules. Just because someone is in core this does not mean that they have special dispensation to step outside any of the lines painted here; core's special powers only kick in when it acts as a group, not on an individual basis. As individuals, the core team members are all committers first and core second. Details Respect other committers. This means that you need to treat other committers as the peer-group developers that they are. Despite our occasional attempts to prove the contrary, one does not get to be a committer by being stupid and nothing rankles more than being treated that way by one of your peers. Whether we always feel respect for one another or not (and everyone has off days), we still have to treat other committers with respect at all times, on public forums and in private email. Being able to work together long term is this project's greatest asset, one far more important than any set of changes to the code, and turning arguments about code into issues that affect our long-term ability to work harmoniously together is just not worth the trade-off by any conceivable stretch of the imagination. To comply with this rule, do not send email when you are angry or otherwise behave in a manner which is likely to strike others as needlessly confrontational. First calm down, then think about how to communicate in the most effective fashion for convincing the other persons that your side of the argument is correct, do not just blow off some steam so you can feel better in the short term at the cost of a long-term flame war. Not only is this very bad energy economics, but repeated displays of public aggression which impair our ability to work well together will be dealt with severely by the project leadership and may result in suspension or termination of your commit privileges. The project leadership will take into account both public and private communications brought before it. It will not seek the disclosure of private communications, but it will take it into account if it is volunteered by the committers involved in the complaint. All of this is never an option which the project's leadership enjoys in the slightest, but unity comes first. No amount of code or good advice is worth trading that away. Respect other contributors. You were not always a committer. At one time you were a contributor. Remember that at all times. Remember what it was like trying to get help and attention. Do not forget that your work as a contributor was very important to you. Remember what it was like. Do not discourage, belittle, or demean contributors. Treat them with respect. They are our committers in waiting. They are every bit as important to the project as committers. Their contributions are as valid and as important as your own. After all, you made many contributions before you became a committer. Always remember that. Consider the points raised under and apply them also to contributors. Discuss any significant change before committing. The repository is not where changes are initially submitted for correctness or argued over, that happens first in the mailing lists or by use of the Phabricator service. The commit will only happen once something resembling consensus has been reached. This does not mean that permission is required before correcting every obvious syntax error or manual page misspelling, just that it is good to develop a feel for when a proposed change is not quite such a no-brainer and requires some feedback first. People really do not mind sweeping changes if the result is something clearly better than what they had before, they just do not like being surprised by those changes. The very best way of making sure that things are on the right track is to have code reviewed by one or more other committers. When in doubt, ask for review! Respect existing maintainers if listed. Many parts of &os; are not owned in the sense that any specific individual will jump up and yell if you commit a change to their area, but it still pays to check first. One convention we use is to put a maintainer line in the Makefile for any package or subtree which is being actively maintained by one or more people; see https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/policies.html for documentation on this. Where sections of code have several maintainers, commits to affected areas by one maintainer need to be reviewed by at least one other maintainer. In cases where the maintainer-ship of something is not clear, look at the repository logs for the files in question and see if someone has been working recently or predominantly in that area. Other areas of &os; fall under the control of someone who manages an overall category of &os; evolution, such as internationalization or networking. See https://www.FreeBSD.org/administration.html for more information on this. Any disputed change must be backed out pending resolution of the dispute if requested by a maintainer. Security related changes may override a maintainer's wishes at the Security Officer's discretion. This may be hard to swallow in times of conflict (when each side is convinced that they are in the right, of course) but a version control system makes it unnecessary to have an ongoing dispute raging when it is far easier to simply reverse the disputed change, get everyone calmed down again and then try to figure out what is the best way to proceed. If the change turns out to be the best thing after all, it can be easily brought back. If it turns out not to be, then the users did not have to live with the bogus change in the tree while everyone was busily debating its merits. People very rarely call for back-outs in the repository since discussion generally exposes bad or controversial changes before the commit even happens, but on such rare occasions the back-out should be done without argument so that we can get immediately on to the topic of figuring out whether it was bogus or not. Changes go to &os.current; before &os.stable; unless specifically permitted by the release engineer or unless they are not applicable to &os.current;. Any non-trivial or non-urgent change which is applicable should also be allowed to sit in &os.current; for at least 3 days before merging so that it can be given sufficient testing. The release engineer has the same authority over the &os.stable; branch as outlined in rule #5. This is another do not argue about it issue since it is the release engineer who is ultimately responsible (and gets beaten up) if a change turns out to be bad. Please respect this and give the release engineer your full cooperation when it comes to the &os.stable; branch. The management of &os.stable; may frequently seem to be overly conservative to the casual observer, but also bear in mind the fact that conservatism is supposed to be the hallmark of &os.stable; and different rules apply there than in &os.current;. There is also really no point in having &os.current; be a testing ground if changes are merged over to &os.stable; immediately. Changes need a chance to be tested by the &os.current; developers, so allow some time to elapse before merging unless the &os.stable; fix is critical, time sensitive or so obvious as to make further testing unnecessary (spelling fixes to manual pages, obvious bug/typo fixes, etc.) In other words, apply common sense. Changes to the security branches (for example, releng/9.3) must be approved by a member of the &a.security-officer;, or in some cases, by a member of the &a.re;. Do not fight in public with other committers; it looks bad. This project has a public image to uphold and that image is very important to all of us, especially if we are to continue to attract new members. There will be occasions when, despite everyone's very best attempts at self-control, tempers are lost and angry words are exchanged. The best thing that can be done in such cases is to minimize the effects of this until everyone has cooled back down. Do not air angry words in public and do not forward private correspondence or other private communications to public mailing lists, mail aliases, instant messaging channels or social media sites. What people say one-to-one is often much less sugar-coated than what they would say in public, and such communications therefore have no place there - they only serve to inflame an already bad situation. If the person sending a flame-o-gram at least had the grace to send it privately, then have the grace to keep it private yourself. If you feel you are being unfairly treated by another developer, and it is causing you anguish, bring the matter up with core rather than taking it public. Core will do its best to play peace makers and get things back to sanity. In cases where the dispute involves a change to the codebase and the participants do not appear to be reaching an amicable agreement, core may appoint a mutually-agreeable third party to resolve the dispute. All parties involved must then agree to be bound by the decision reached by this third party. Respect all code freezes and read the committers and developers mailing list on a timely basis so you know when a code freeze is in effect. Committing unapproved changes during a code freeze is a really big mistake and committers are expected to keep up-to-date on what is going on before jumping in after a long absence and committing 10 megabytes worth of accumulated stuff. People who abuse this on a regular basis will have their commit privileges suspended until they get back from the &os; Happy Reeducation Camp we run in Greenland. When in doubt on any procedure, ask first! Many mistakes are made because someone is in a hurry and just assumes they know the right way of doing something. If you have not done it before, chances are good that you do not actually know the way we do things and really need to ask first or you are going to completely embarrass yourself in public. There is no shame in asking how in the heck do I do this? We already know you are an intelligent person; otherwise, you would not be a committer. Test your changes before committing them. This may sound obvious, but if it really were so obvious then we probably would not see so many cases of people clearly not doing this. If your changes are to the kernel, make sure you can still compile both GENERIC and LINT. If your changes are anywhere else, make sure you can still make world. If your changes are to a branch, make sure your testing occurs with a machine which is running that code. If you have a change which also may break another architecture, be sure and test on all supported architectures. Please refer to the &os; Internal Page for a list of available resources. As other architectures are added to the &os; supported platforms list, the appropriate shared testing resources will be made available. Do not commit to anything under the src/contrib, src/crypto, and src/sys/contrib trees without explicit approval from the respective maintainers. The trees mentioned above are for contributed software usually imported onto a vendor branch. Committing something there, even if it does not take the file off the vendor branch, may cause unnecessary headaches for those responsible for maintaining that particular piece of software. Thus, unless you have explicit approval from the maintainer (or you are the maintainer), do not commit there! Please note that this does not mean you should not try to improve the software in question; you are still more than welcome to do so. Ideally, submit your patches to the vendor. If your changes are &os;-specific, talk to the maintainer; they may be willing to apply them locally. But whatever you do, do not commit there by yourself! Contact the &a.core; if you wish to take up maintainership of an unmaintained part of the tree. Policy on Multiple Architectures &os; has added several new architecture ports during recent release cycles and is truly no longer an &i386; centric operating system. In an effort to make it easier to keep &os; portable across the platforms we support, core has developed this mandate:
Our 32-bit reference platform is &arch.i386;, and our 64-bit reference platform is &arch.amd64;. Major design work (including major API and ABI changes) must prove itself on at least one 32-bit and at least one 64-bit platform, preferably the primary reference platforms, before it may be committed to the source tree.
The &arch.i386; and &arch.amd64; platforms were chosen due to being more readily available to developers and as representatives of more diverse processor and system designs - big versus little endian, register file versus register stack, different DMA and cache implementations, hardware page tables versus software TLB management etc. We will continue to re-evaluate this policy as cost and availability of the 64-bit platforms change. Developers should also be aware of our Tier Policy for the long term support of hardware architectures. The rules here are intended to provide guidance during the development process, and are distinct from the requirements for features and architectures listed in that section. The Tier rules for feature support on architectures at release-time are more strict than the rules for changes during the development process. Other Suggestions When committing documentation changes, use a spell checker before committing. For all XML docs, verify that the formatting directives are correct by running make lint and textproc/igor. For manual pages, run sysutils/manck and textproc/igor over the manual page to verify all of the cross references and file references are correct and that the man page has all of the appropriate MLINKs installed. Do not mix style fixes with new functionality. A style fix is any change which does not modify the functionality of the code. Mixing the changes obfuscates the functionality change when asking for differences between revisions, which can hide any new bugs. Do not include whitespace changes with content changes in commits to doc/ . The extra clutter in the diffs makes the translators' job much more difficult. Instead, make any style or whitespace changes in separate commits that are clearly labeled as such in the commit message. Deprecating Features When it is necessary to remove functionality from software in the base system, follow these guidelines whenever possible: Mention is made in the manual page and possibly the release notes that the option, utility, or interface is deprecated. Use of the deprecated feature generates a warning. The option, utility, or interface is preserved until the next major (point zero) release. The option, utility, or interface is removed and no longer documented. It is now obsolete. It is also generally a good idea to note its removal in the release notes. Privacy and Confidentiality Most &os; business is done in public. &os; is an open project. Which means that not only can anyone use the source code, but that most of the development process is open to public scrutiny. Certain sensitive matters must remain private or held under embargo. There unfortunately cannot be complete transparency. As a &os; developer you will have a certain degree of privileged access to information. Consequently you are expected to respect certain requirements for confidentiality. Sometimes the need for confidentiality comes from external collaborators or has a specific time limit. Mostly though, it is a matter of not releasing private communications. The Security Officer has sole control over the release of security advisories. Where there are security problems that affect many different operating systems, &os; frequently depends on early access to be able to prepare advisories for coordinated release. Unless &os; developers can be trusted to maintain security, such early access will not be made available. The Security Officer is responsible for controlling pre-release access to information about vulnerabilities, and for timing the release of all advisories. He may request help under condition of confidentiality from any developer with relevant knowledge to prepare security fixes. Communications with Core are kept confidential for as long as necessary. Communications to core will initially be treated as confidential. Eventually however, most of Core's business will be summarized into the monthly or quarterly core reports. Care will be taken to avoid publicising any sensitive details. Records of some particularly sensitive subjects may not be reported on at all and will be retained only in Core's private archives. Non-disclosure Agreements may be required for access to certain commercially sensitive data. Access to certain commercially sensitive data may only be available under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The FreeBSD Foundation legal staff must be consulted before any binding agreements are entered into. Private communications must not be made public without permission. Beyond the specific requirements above there is a general expectation not to publish private communications between developers without the consent of all parties involved. Ask permission before forwarding a message onto a public mailing list, or posting it to a forum or website that can be accessed by other than the original correspondents. Communications on project-only or restricted access channels must be kept private. Similarly to personal communications, certain internal communications channels, including &os; Committer only mailing lists and restricted access IRC channels are considered private communications. Permission is required to publish material from these sources. Core may approve publication. Where it is impractical to obtain permission due to the number of correspondents or where permission to publish is unreasonably withheld, Core may approve release of such private matters that merit more general publication. Support for Multiple Architectures &os; is a highly portable operating system intended to function on many different types of hardware architectures. Maintaining clean separation of Machine Dependent (MD) and Machine Independent (MI) code, as well as minimizing MD code, is an important part of our strategy to remain agile with regards to current hardware trends. Each new hardware architecture supported by &os; adds substantially to the cost of code maintenance, toolchain support, and release engineering. It also dramatically increases the cost of effective testing of kernel changes. As such, there is strong motivation to differentiate between classes of support for various architectures while remaining strong in a few key architectures that are seen as the &os; target audience. Statement of General Intent The &os; Project targets "production quality commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) workstation, server, and high-end embedded systems". By retaining a focus on a narrow set of architectures of interest in these environments, the &os; Project is able to maintain high levels of quality, stability, and performance, as well as minimize the load on various support teams on the project, such as the ports team, documentation team, security officer, and release engineering teams. Diversity in hardware support broadens the options for &os; consumers by offering new features and usage opportunities (such as support for 64-bit CPUs, use in embedded environments, etc.), but these benefits must always be carefully considered in terms of the real-world maintenance cost associated with additional platform support. The &os; Project differentiates platform targets into four tiers. Each tier includes a specification of the requirements for an architecture to be in that tier, as well as specifying the obligations of developers with regards to the platform. In addition, a policy is defined regarding the circumstances required to change the tier of an architecture. Tier 1: Fully Supported Architectures Tier 1 platforms are fully supported by the security officer, release engineering, and toolchain maintenance staff. New features added to the operating system must be fully functional across all Tier 1 architectures for every release (features which are inherently architecture-specific, such as support for hardware device drivers, may be exempt from this requirement). In general, all Tier 1 platforms must have build and Tinderbox support either in the FreeBSD.org cluster, or be easily available for all developers. Embedded platforms may substitute an emulator available in the &os; cluster for actual hardware. Tier 1 architectures are expected to be Production Quality with respects to all aspects of the &os; operating system, including installation and development environments. Tier 1 architectures are expected to be completely integrated into the source tree and have all features necessary to produce an entire system relevant for that target architecture. Tier 1 architectures generally have at least 6 active developers. Tier 1 architectures are expected to be fully supported by the ports system. All the ports should build on a Tier 1 platform, or have the appropriate filters to prevent the inappropriate ones from building there. The packaging system must support all Tier 1 architectures. To ensure an architecture's Tier 1 status, proponents of that architecture must show that all relevant packages can be built on that platform. Tier 1 embedded architectures must be able to cross-build packages on at least one other Tier 1 architecture. The packages must be the most relevant for the platform, but may be a non-empty subset of those that build natively. Tier 1 architectures must be fully documented. All basic operations need to be covered by the handbook or other documents. All relevant integration documentation must also be integrated into the tree, or readily available. Current Tier 1 platforms are &arch.i386; and &arch.amd64;. Tier 2: Developmental Architectures Tier 2 platforms are not supported by the security officer and release engineering teams. Platform maintainers are responsible for toolchain support in the tree. The toolchain maintainers are expected to work with the platform maintainers to refine these changes. Major new toolchain components are allowed to break support for Tier 2 architectures if the &os;-local changes have not been incorporated upstream. The toolchain maintainers are expected to provide prompt review of any proposed changes and cannot block, through their inaction, changes going into the tree. New features added to &os; should be feasible to implement on these platforms, but an implementation is not required before the feature may be added to the &os; source tree. New features that may be difficult to implement on Tier 2 architectures should provide a means of disabling them on those architectures. The implementation of a Tier 2 architecture may be committed to the main &os; tree as long as it does not interfere with production work on Tier 1 platforms, or substantially with other Tier 2 platforms. Before a Tier 2 platform can be added to the &os; base source tree, the platform must be able to boot multi-user on actual hardware. Generally, there must be at least three active developers working on the platform. Tier 2 architectures are usually systems targeted at Tier 1 support, but that are still under development. Architectures reaching end of life may also be moved from Tier 1 status to Tier 2 status as the availability of resources to continue to maintain the system in a Production Quality state diminishes. Well supported niche architectures may also be Tier 2. Tier 2 architectures have basic support for them integrated into the ports infrastructure. They may have cross compilation support added, at the discretion of portmgr. Some ports must built natively into packages if the package system supports that architecture. If not integrated into the base system, some external patches for the architecture for ports must be available. Tier 2 architectures can be integrated into the &os; handbook. The basics for how to get a system running must be documented, although not necessarily for every single board or system a Tier 2 architecture supports. The supported hardware list must exist and be relatively recent. It should be integrated into the &os; documentation. Current Tier 2 platforms are &arch.arm;, &arch.arm64;, &arch.ia64; (through &os; 10), &arch.pc98;, &arch.powerpc;, and &arch.sparc64;. Tier 3: Experimental Architectures Tier 3 platforms are not supported by the security officer and release engineering teams. At the discretion of the toolchain maintainers, they may be supported in the toolchain. Tier 3 platforms are architectures in the early stages of development, for non-mainstream hardware platforms, or which are considered legacy systems unlikely to see broad future use. Initial support for Tier 3 platforms is worked on in external SCM repositories. The transition to &os;'s subversion takes place after the platform boots multi-user on hardware; sharing via subversion is needed for wider exposure; and multiple developers are actively working on the platform. Platforms that transition to Tier 3 status may be removed from the tree if they are no longer actively supported by the &os; developer community at the discretion of the release engineer. Tier 3 platforms may have ports support, either integrated or external, but do not require it. Tier 3 platforms must have the basics documented for how to build a kernel and how to boot it on at least one target hardware or emulation environment. This documentation need not be integrated into the &os; tree. Current Tier 3 platforms are &arch.mips;, and &arch.riscv;. Tier 4: Unsupported Architectures Tier 4 systems are not supported in any form by the project. All systems not otherwise classified into a support tier are Tier 4 systems. The &arch.ia64; platform is transitioning to Tier 4 status in &os; 11. Policy on Changing the Tier of an Architecture Systems may only be moved from one tier to another by approval of the &os; Core Team, which shall make that decision in collaboration with the Security Officer, Release Engineering, and toolchain maintenance teams. Ports Specific FAQ Adding a New Port How do I add a new port? First, please read the section about repository copies. The easiest way to add a new port is the addport script located in the ports/Tools/scripts directory. It adds a port from the directory specified, determining the category automatically from the port Makefile. It also adds an entry to the port's category Makefile. It was written by &a.mharo.email;, &a.will.email;, and &a.garga.email;. When sending questions about this script to the &a.ports;, please also CC &a.crees.email;, the current maintainer. Any other things I need to know when I add a new port? Check the port, preferably to make sure it compiles and packages correctly. This is the recommended sequence: &prompt.root; make install &prompt.root; make package &prompt.root; make deinstall &prompt.root; pkg add package you built above &prompt.root; make deinstall &prompt.root; make reinstall &prompt.root; make package The Porters Handbook contains more detailed instructions. Use &man.portlint.1; to check the syntax of the port. You do not necessarily have to eliminate all warnings but make sure you have fixed the simple ones. If the port came from a submitter who has not contributed to the Project before, add that person's name to the Additional Contributors section of the &os; Contributors List. Close the PR if the port came in as a PR. To close a PR, change the state to Issue Resolved and the resolution as Fixed. Removing an Existing Port How do I remove an existing port? First, please read the section about repository copies. Before you remove the port, you have to verify there are no other ports depending on it. Make sure there is no dependency on the port in the ports collection: The port's PKGNAME appears in exactly one line in a recent INDEX file. No other ports contains any reference to the port's directory or PKGNAME in their Makefiles When using Git, consider using git grep, it is much faster than grep -r. Then, remove the port: Remove the port's files and directory with svn remove. Remove the SUBDIR listing of the port in the parent directory Makefile. Add an entry to ports/MOVED. Search for entries in ports/security/vuxml/vuln.xml and adjust them accordingly. In particular, check for previous packages with the new name which version could include the new port. Remove the port from ports/LEGAL if it is there. Alternatively, you can use the rmport script, from ports/Tools/scripts. This script was written by &a.vd.email;. When sending questions about this script to the &a.ports;, please also CC &a.crees.email;, the current maintainer. Re-adding a Deleted Port How do I re-add a deleted port? This is essentially the reverse of deleting a port. Do not use svn add to add the port. Follow these steps. If they are unclear, or are not working, ask for help, do not just svn add the port. Figure out when the port was removed. Use this list, + xlink:href="https://people.FreeBSD.org/~crees/removed_ports/index.xml">list, or look for the port on freshports, and then copy the last living revision of the port: &prompt.user; cd /usr/ports/category &prompt.user; svn cp 'svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/ports/head/category/portname/@XXXXXX' portname Pick the revision that is just before the removal. For example, if the revision where it was removed is 269874, use 269873. It is also possible to specify a date. In that case, pick a date that is before the removal but after the last commit to the port. &prompt.user; cd /usr/ports/category &prompt.user; svn cp 'svn+ssh://repo.freebsd.org/ports/head/category/portname/@{YYYY-MM-DD}' portname Make the changes necessary to get the port working again. If it was deleted because the distfiles are no longer available, either volunteer to host the distfiles, or find someone else to do so. If some files have been added, or were removed during the resurrection process, use svn add or svn remove to make sure all the files in the port will be committed. Restore the SUBDIR listing of the port in the parent directory Makefile, keeping the entries sorted. Delete the port entry from ports/MOVED. If the port had an entry in ports/LEGAL, restore it. svn commit these changes, preferably in one step. The addport script mentioned in now detects when the port to add has previously existed, and attempts to handle all except the ports/LEGAL step automatically. Repository Copies When do we need a repository copy? When you want to add a port that is related to any port that is already in the tree in a separate directory, you have to do a repository copy. Here related means it is a different version or a slightly modified version. Examples are print/ghostscript* (different versions) and x11-wm/windowmaker* (English-only and internationalized version). Another example is when a port is moved from one subdirectory to another, or when the name of a directory must be changed because the authors renamed their software even though it is a descendant of a port already in a tree. What do I need to do? With Subversion, a repo copy can be done by any committer: Doing a repo copy: Verify that the target directory does not exist. Use svn up to make certain the original files, directories, and checkout information is current. Use svn move or svn copy to do the repo copy. Upgrade the copied port to the new version. Remember to add or change the PKGNAMEPREFIX or PKGNAMESUFFIX so there are no duplicate ports with the same name. In some rare cases it may be necessary to change the PORTNAME instead of adding PKGNAMEPREFIX or PKGNAMESUFFIX, but this is only done when it is really needed — for example, using an existing port as the base for a very similar program with a different name, or upgrading a port to a new upstream version which actually changes the distribution name, like the transition from textproc/libxml to textproc/libxml2. In most cases, adding or changing PKGNAMEPREFIX or PKGNAMESUFFIX suffices. Add the new subdirectory to the SUBDIR listing in the parent directory Makefile. You can run make checksubdirs in the parent directory to check this. If the port changed categories, modify the CATEGORIES line of the port's Makefile accordingly Add an entry to ports/MOVED, if you remove the original port. Commit all changes on one commit. When removing a port: Perform a thorough check of the ports collection for any dependencies on the old port location/name, and update them. Running grep on INDEX is not enough because some ports have dependencies enabled by compile-time options. A full grep -r of the ports collection is recommended. Remove the old port and the old SUBDIR entry. Add an entry to ports/MOVED. After repo moves (rename operations where a port is copied and the old location is removed): Follow the same steps that are outlined in the previous two entries, to activate the new location of the port and remove the old one. Ports Freeze What is a ports freeze? A ports freeze was a restricted state the ports tree was put in before a release. It was used to ensure a higher quality for the packages shipped with a release. It usually lasted a couple of weeks. During that time, build problems were fixed, and the release packages were built. This practice is no longer used, as the packages for the releases are built from the current stable, quarterly branch. For more information on how to merge commits to the quarterly branch, see . Quarterly Branches What is the procedure to request authorization for merging a commit to the quarterly branch? When doing the commit, add the branch name to the MFH: line, for example: MFH: 2014Q1 It will automatically notify the &a.ports-secteam; and the &a.portmgr;. They will then decide if the commit can be merged and answer with the procedure. If the commit has already been made, send an email to the &a.ports-secteam; and the &a.portmgr; with the revision number and a small description of why the commit needs to be merged. Are there any changes that can be committed without approval? The following blanket approvals are in effect: Fixes that do not result in a change in contents of the resulting package. For example: pkg-descr: WWW: URL updates (existing 404, moved or incorrect) Build, runtime or packaging fixes, if the quarterly branch version is currently broken. These fixes must be tested on the quarterly branch. Missing dependencies (detected, linked against but not registered via *_DEPENDS). Fixing shebangs, stripping installed libraries and binaries, and plist fixes. Backport of security and reliability fixes which only result in PORTREVISION bumps and no changes to enabled features. for example, adding a patch fixing a buffer overflow. No unauthorized commits can ever be made without approval of either &a.ports-secteam; or &a.portmgr;. What is the procedure for merging commits to the quarterly branch? A script is provided to automate merging a specific commit: ports/Tools/scripts/mfh. It is used as follows: &prompt.user; /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/mfh 380362 U 2015Q1 Checked out revision 380443. A 2015Q1/security Updating '2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit': A 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit A 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/Makefile A 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/distinfo A 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/pkg-descr Updated to revision 380443. --- Merging r380362 into '2015Q1': U 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/Makefile U 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/distinfo --- Recording mergeinfo for merge of r380362 into '2015Q1': U 2015Q1 --- Recording mergeinfo for merge of r380362 into '2015Q1/security': G 2015Q1/security --- Eliding mergeinfo from '2015Q1/security': U 2015Q1/security --- Recording mergeinfo for merge of r380362 into '2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit': G 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit --- Eliding mergeinfo from '2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit': U 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit M 2015Q1 M 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/Makefile M 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/distinfo Index: 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/Makefile =================================================================== --- 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/Makefile (revision 380443) +++ 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/Makefile (working copy) @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ # $FreeBSD$ PORTNAME= sshkit -PORTVERSION= 1.6.1 +PORTVERSION= 1.7.0 CATEGORIES= security rubygems MASTER_SITES= RG Index: 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/distinfo =================================================================== --- 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/distinfo (revision 380443) +++ 2015Q1/security/rubygem-sshkit/distinfo (working copy) @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@ -SHA256 (rubygem/sshkit-1.6.1.gem) = 8ca67e46bb4ea50fdb0553cda77552f3e41b17a5aa919877d93875dfa22c03a7 -SIZE (rubygem/sshkit-1.6.1.gem) = 135680 +SHA256 (rubygem/sshkit-1.7.0.gem) = 90effd1813363bae7355f4a45ebc8335a8ca74acc8d0933ba6ee6d40f281a2cf +SIZE (rubygem/sshkit-1.7.0.gem) = 136192 Index: 2015Q1 =================================================================== --- 2015Q1 (revision 380443) +++ 2015Q1 (working copy) Property changes on: 2015Q1 ___________________________________________________________________ Modified: svn:mergeinfo Merged /head:r380362 Do you want to commit? (no = start a shell) [y/n] At that point, the script will either open a shell for you to fix things, or open your text editor with the commit message all prepared and then commit the merge. The script assumes that you can connect to repo.FreeBSD.org with SSH directly, so if your local login name is different than your &os; cluster account, you need a few lines in your ~/.ssh/config: Host repo.freebsd.org # Can be *.freebsd.org User freebsd-login The script is also able to merge more than one revision at a time. If there have been other updates to the port since the branch was created that have not been merged because they were not security related. Add the different revisions in the order they were committed on the mfh command line. The new commit log message will contain the combined log messages from all the original commits. These messages must be edited to show what is actually being done with the new commit. &prompt.user; /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/mfh r407208 r407713 r407722 r408567 r408943 r410728 The mfh script can also take an optional first argument, the branch where the merge is being done. Only the latest quarterly branch is supported, so specifying the branch is discouraged. To be safe, the script will give a warning if the quarterly branch is not the latest: &prompt.user; /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/mfh 2016Q1 r407208 r407713 /!\ The latest branch is 2016Q2, do you really want to commit to 2016Q1? [y/n] Creating a New Category What is the procedure for creating a new category? Please see Proposing a New Category in the Porter's Handbook. Once that procedure has been followed and the PR has been assigned to the &a.portmgr;, it is their decision whether or not to approve it. If they do, it is their responsibility to: Perform any needed moves. (This only applies to physical categories.) Update the VALID_CATEGORIES definition in ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk. Assign the PR back to you. What do I need to do to implement a new physical category? Upgrade each moved port's Makefile. Do not connect the new category to the build yet. To do this, you will need to: Change the port's CATEGORIES (this was the point of the exercise, remember?) The new category is listed first. This will help to ensure that the PKGORIGIN is correct. Run a make describe. Since the top-level make index that you will be running in a few steps is an iteration of make describe over the entire ports hierarchy, catching any errors here will save you having to re-run that step later on. If you want to be really thorough, now might be a good time to run &man.portlint.1;. Check that the PKGORIGINs are correct. The ports system uses each port's CATEGORIES entry to create its PKGORIGIN, which is used to connect installed packages to the port directory they were built from. If this entry is wrong, common port tools like &man.pkg.version.1; and &man.portupgrade.1; fail. To do this, use the chkorigin.sh tool: env PORTSDIR=/path/to/ports sh -e /path/to/ports/Tools/scripts/chkorigin.sh. This will check every port in the ports tree, even those not connected to the build, so you can run it directly after the move operation. Hint: do not forget to look at the PKGORIGINs of any slave ports of the ports you just moved! On your own local system, test the proposed changes: first, comment out the SUBDIR entries in the old ports' categories' Makefiles; then enable building the new category in ports/Makefile. Run make checksubdirs in the affected category directories to check the SUBDIR entries. Next, in the ports/ directory, run make index. This can take over 40 minutes on even modern systems; however, it is a necessary step to prevent problems for other people. Once this is done, you can commit the updated ports/Makefile to connect the new category to the build and also commit the Makefile changes for the old category or categories. Add appropriate entries to ports/MOVED. Update the documentation by modifying: the list of categories in the Porter's Handbook doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/ports. Note that these are now displayed by sub-groups, as specified in doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/ports/categories.descriptions. (Note: these are in the docs, not the ports, repository). If you are not a docs committer, you will need to submit a PR for this. Only once all the above have been done, and no one is any longer reporting problems with the new ports, should the old ports be deleted from their previous locations in the repository. It is not necessary to manually update the ports web pages to reflect the new category. This is done automatically via the change to en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/ports/categories and the automated rebuild of INDEX. What do I need to do to implement a new virtual category? This is much simpler than a physical category. Only a few modifications are needed: the list of categories in the Porter's Handbook en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/ports/categories Miscellaneous Questions How do I know if my port is building correctly or not? The packages are built multiple times each week. If a port fails, the maintainer will receive an email from pkg-fallout@FreeBSD.org. Reports for all the package builds (official, experimental, and non-regression) are aggregated at pkg-status.FreeBSD.org. I added a new port. Do I need to add it to the INDEX? No. The file can either be generated by running make index, or a pre-generated version can be downloaded with make fetchindex. Are there any other files I am not allowed to touch? Any file directly under ports/, or any file under a subdirectory that starts with an uppercase letter (Mk/, Tools/, etc.). In particular, the &a.portmgr; is very protective of ports/Mk/bsd.port*.mk so do not commit changes to those files unless you want to face their wra(i)th. What is the proper procedure for updating the checksum for a port's distfile when the file changes without a version change? When the checksum for a distribution file is updated due to the author updating the file without changing the port's revision, the commit message includes a summary of the relevant diffs between the original and new distfile to ensure that the distfile has not been corrupted or maliciously altered. If the current version of the port has been in the ports tree for a while, a copy of the old distfile will usually be available on the ftp servers; otherwise the author or maintainer should be contacted to find out why the distfile has changed. How can an experimental test build of the ports tree (exp-run) be requested? An exp-run must be completed before patches with a significant ports impact are committed. The patch can be against the ports tree or the base system. Full package builds will be done with the patches provided by the submitter, and the submitter is required to fix detected problems (fallout) before commit. Go to the Bugzilla new PR page. Select the product your patch is about. Fill in the bug report as normal. Remember to attach the patch. If at the top it says Show Advanced Fields click on it. It will now say Hide Advanced Fields. Many new fields will be available. If it already says Hide Advanced Fields, no need to do anything. In the Flags section, set the exp-run one to ?. As for all other fields, hovering the mouse over any field shows more details. Submit. When the &a.portmgr; replies, fix the fallout. The fallout might be a bug in the original patch or other ports that need to be fixed. Both need to be addressed. Update the patch to repair all the fallout and repeat. Issues Specific to Developers Who Are Not Committers A few people who have access to the &os; machines do not have commit bits. Almost all of this document will apply to these developers as well (except things specific to commits and the mailing list memberships that go with them). In particular, we recommend that you read: Administrative Details Conventions Get your mentor to add you to the Additional Contributors (doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/contrib.additional.xml), if you are not already listed there. Developer Relations SSH Quick-Start Guide The &os; Committers' Big List of Rules Information About &ga; As of December 12, 2012, &ga; was enabled on the &os; Project website to collect anonymized usage statistics regarding usage of the site. The information collected is valuable to the &os; Documentation Project, to identify various problems on the &os; website. &ga; General Policy The &os; Project takes visitor privacy very seriously. As such, the &os; Project website honors the Do Not Track header before fetching the tracking code from Google. For more information, please see the &os; Privacy Policy. &ga; access is not arbitrarily allowed — access must be requested, voted on by the &a.doceng;, and explicitly granted. Requests for &ga; data must include a specific purpose. For example, a valid reason for requesting access would be to see the most frequently used web browsers when viewing &os; web pages to ensure page rendering speeds are acceptable. Conversely, to see what web browsers are most frequently used (without stating why) would be rejected. All requests must include the timeframe for which the data would be required. For example, it must be explicitly stated if the requested data would be needed for a timeframe covering a span of 3 weeks, or if the request would be one-time only. Any request for &ga; data without a clear, reasonable reason beneficial to the &os; Project will be rejected. Data Available Through &ga; A few examples of the types of &ga; data available include: Commonly used web browsers Page load times Site access by language Miscellaneous Questions Why are trivial or cosmetic changes to files on a vendor branch a bad idea? From now on, every new vendor release of that file will need to have patches merged in by hand. From now on, every new vendor release of that file will need to have patches verified by hand. How do I add a new file to a branch? To add a file onto a branch, simply checkout or update to the branch you want to add to and then add the file using the add operation as you normally would. This works fine for the doc and ports trees. The src tree uses SVN and requires more care because of the mergeinfo properties. See the Subversion Primer for details on how to perform an MFC. How do I access people.FreeBSD.org to put up personal or project information? people.FreeBSD.org is the same as freefall.FreeBSD.org. Just create a public_html directory. Anything you place in that directory will automatically be visible under http://people.FreeBSD.org/. + xlink:href="https://people.FreeBSD.org/">https://people.FreeBSD.org/. Where are the mailing list archives stored? The mailing lists are archived under /local/mail on freefall.FreeBSD.org. I would like to mentor a new committer. What process do I need to follow? See the New Account Creation Procedure document on the internal pages. Benefits and Perks for &os; Comitters Recognition Recognition as a competent software engineer is the longest lasting value. In addition, getting a chance to work with some of the best people that every engineer would dream of meeting is a great perk! FreeBSD Mall &os; committers can get a free 4-CD or DVD set at conferences from &os; Mall, Inc.. <acronym>IRC</acronym> In addition, developers may request a cloaked hostmask for their account on the Freenode IRC network in the form of freebsd/developer/freefall name or freebsd/developer/NickServ name. To request a cloak, send an email to &a.irc.email; with your requested hostmask and NickServ account name. <systemitem class="domainname">Gandi.net</systemitem> Gandi provides website hosting, cloud computing, domain registration, and X.509 certificate services. Gandi offers an E-rate discount to all &os; developers. Send mail to non-profit@gandi.net using your @freebsd.org mail address, and indicate your Gandi handle.
Index: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/article.xml =================================================================== --- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/article.xml (revision 51010) +++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/article.xml (revision 51011) @@ -1,1220 +1,1220 @@
Contributing to FreeBSD This article describes the different ways in which an individual or organization may contribute to the FreeBSD Project. JordanHubbard SamLawrance MarkLinimon &tm-attrib.freebsd; &tm-attrib.ieee; &tm-attrib.general; $FreeBSD$ $FreeBSD$ contributing So you want to contribute to &os;? That is great! &os; relies on the contributions of its user base to survive. Your contributions are not only appreciated, they are vital to &os;'s continued growth. A large and growing number of international contributors, of greatly varying ages and areas of technical expertise, develop &os;. There is always more work to be done than there are people available to do it, and more help is always appreciated. As a volunteer, what you do is limited only by what you want to do. However, we do ask that you are aware of what other members of the &os; community will expect of you. You may want to take this into account before deciding to volunteer. The &os; project is responsible for an entire operating system environment, rather than just a kernel or a few scattered utilities. As such, our TODO lists span a very wide range of tasks: from documentation, beta testing and presentation, to the system installer and highly specialized types of kernel development. People of any skill level, in almost any area, can almost certainly help the project. Commercial entities engaged in FreeBSD-related enterprises are also encouraged to contact us. Do you need a special extension to make your product work? You will find us receptive to your requests, given that they are not too outlandish. Are you working on a value-added product? Please let us know! We may be able to work cooperatively on some aspect of it. The free software world is challenging many existing assumptions about how software is developed, sold, and maintained, and we urge you to at least give it a second look. What Is Needed The following list of tasks and sub-projects represents something of an amalgam of various TODO lists and user requests. Ongoing Non-Programmer Tasks Many people who are involved in FreeBSD are not programmers. The Project includes documentation writers, Web designers, and support people. All that these people need to contribute is an investment of time and a willingness to learn. Read through the FAQ and Handbook periodically. If anything is badly explained, out of date or even just completely wrong, let us know. Even better, send us a fix (Docbook is not difficult to learn, but there is no objection to ASCII submissions). Help translate FreeBSD documentation into your native language. If documentation already exists for your language, you can help translate additional documents or verify that the translations are up-to-date. First take a look at the Translations FAQ in the FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer. You are not committing yourself to translating every single FreeBSD document by doing this — as a volunteer, you can do as much or as little translation as you desire. Once someone begins translating, others almost always join the effort. If you only have the time or energy to translate one part of the documentation, please translate the installation instructions. Read the &a.questions; occasionally (or even regularly). It can be very satisfying to share your expertise and help people solve their problems; sometimes you may even learn something new yourself! These forums can also be a source of ideas for things to work on. Ongoing Programmer Tasks Most of the tasks listed here require either a considerable investment of time, or an in-depth knowledge of the FreeBSD kernel, or both. However, there are also many useful tasks which are suitable for weekend hackers. If you run FreeBSD-CURRENT and have a good Internet connection, there is a machine current.FreeBSD.org which builds a full release once a day—every now and again, try to install the latest release from it and report any failures in the process. Read the &a.bugs;. There might be a problem you can comment constructively on or with patches you can test. Or you could even try to fix one of the problems yourself. If you know of any bug fixes which have been successfully applied to -CURRENT but have not been merged into -STABLE after a decent interval (normally a couple of weeks), send the committer a polite reminder. Move contributed software to src/contrib in the source tree. Make sure code in src/contrib is up to date. Build the source tree (or just part of it) with extra warnings enabled and clean up the warnings. Fix warnings for ports which do deprecated things like using gets() or including malloc.h. If you have contributed any ports and you had to make &os;-specific changes, send your patches back to the original authors (this will make your life easier when they bring out the next version). Get copies of formal standards like &posix;. Compare FreeBSD's behavior to that required by the standard. If the behavior differs, particularly in subtle or obscure corners of the specification, send in a PR about it. If you are able, figure out how to fix it and include a patch in the PR. If you think the standard is wrong, ask the standards body to consider the question. Suggest further tasks for this list! Work through the PR Database problem reports database The FreeBSD PR list shows all the current active problem reports and requests for enhancement that have been submitted by FreeBSD users. The PR database includes both programmer and non-programmer tasks. Look through the open PRs, and see if anything there takes your interest. Some of these might be very simple tasks that just need an extra pair of eyes to look over them and confirm that the fix in the PR is a good one. Others might be much more complex, or might not even have a fix included at all. Start with the PRs that have not been assigned to anyone else. If a PR is assigned to someone else, but it looks like something you can handle, email the person it is assigned to and ask if you can work on it—they might already have a patch ready to be tested, or further ideas that you can discuss with them. Ongoing Ports Tasks The Ports Collection is a perpetual work in progress. We want to provide our users with an easy to use, up to date, high quality repository of third party software. We need people to donate some of their time and effort to help us achieve this goal. Anyone can get involved, and there are lots of different ways to do so. Contributing to ports is an excellent way to help give back something to the project. Whether you are looking for an ongoing role, or a fun challenge for a rainy day, we would love to have your help! There are a number of easy ways you can contribute to keeping the ports tree up to date and in good working order: Find some cool or useful software and create a port for it. There are a large number of ports that have no maintainer. Become a maintainer and adopt a port. If you have created or adopted a port, be aware of what you need to do as a maintainer. When you are looking for a quick challenge you could fix a bug or a broken port. Pick one of the items from the Ideas page The &os; list of projects and ideas for volunteers is also available for people willing to contribute to the &os; project. The list is being regularly updated and contains items for both programmers and non-programmers with information about each project. How to Contribute Contributions to the system generally fall into one or more of the following 5 categories: Bug Reports and General Commentary An idea or suggestion of general technical interest should be mailed to the &a.hackers;. Likewise, people with an interest in such things (and a tolerance for a high volume of mail!) may subscribe to the &a.hackers;. See The FreeBSD Handbook for more information about this and other mailing lists. If you find a bug or are submitting a specific change, please report it using the bug submission form. Try to fill-in each field of the bug report. Unless they exceed 65KB, include any patches directly in the report. If the patch is suitable to be applied to the source tree put [PATCH] in the synopsis of the report. When including patches, do not use cut-and-paste because cut-and-paste turns tabs into spaces and makes them unusable. When patches are a lot larger than 20KB, consider compressing them (eg. with &man.gzip.1; or &man.bzip2.1;) prior to uploading them. After filing a report, you should receive confirmation along with a tracking number. Keep this tracking number so that you can update us with details about the problem. See also this article on how to write good problem reports. Changes to the Documentation documentation submissions Changes to the documentation are overseen by the &a.doc;. Please look at the FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer for complete instructions. Send submissions and changes (even small ones are welcome!) using the same method any other bug report. Changes to Existing Source Code FreeBSD-CURRENT An addition or change to the existing source code is a somewhat trickier affair and depends a lot on how far out of date you are with the current state of FreeBSD development. There is a special on-going release of FreeBSD known as FreeBSD-CURRENT which is made available in a variety of ways for the convenience of developers working actively on the system. See The FreeBSD Handbook for more information about getting and using FreeBSD-CURRENT. Working from older sources unfortunately means that your changes may sometimes be too obsolete or too divergent for easy re-integration into FreeBSD. Chances of this can be minimized somewhat by subscribing to the &a.announce; and the &a.current; lists, where discussions on the current state of the system take place. Assuming that you can manage to secure fairly up-to-date sources to base your changes on, the next step is to produce a set of diffs to send to the FreeBSD maintainers. This is done with the &man.diff.1; command. The preferred &man.diff.1; format for submitting patches is the unified output format generated by diff -u. diff &prompt.user; diff -u oldfile newfile or &prompt.user; diff -u -r -N olddir newdir would generate a set of unified diffs for the given source file or directory hierarchy. See &man.diff.1; for more information. Once you have a set of diffs (which you may test with the &man.patch.1; command), you should submit them for inclusion with &os; as a bug report. Do not just send the diffs to the &a.hackers; or they will get lost! We greatly appreciate your submission (this is a volunteer project!); because we are busy, we may not be able to address it immediately, but it will remain in the PR database until we do. Indicate your submission by including [PATCH] in the synopsis of the report. If you feel it appropriate (e.g. you have added, deleted, or renamed files), bundle your changes into a tar file. Archives created with &man.shar.1; are also welcome. If your change is of a potentially sensitive nature, such as if you are unsure of copyright issues governing its further distribution then you should send it to &a.core; directly rather than submitting as a bug report. The &a.core; reaches a much smaller group of people who do much of the day-to-day work on FreeBSD. Note that this group is also very busy and so you should only send mail to them where it is truly necessary. Please refer to &man.intro.9; and &man.style.9; for some information on coding style. We would appreciate it if you were at least aware of this information before submitting code. New Code or Major Value-Added Packages In the case of a significant contribution of a large body work, or the addition of an important new feature to FreeBSD, it becomes almost always necessary to either send changes as tar files or upload them to a web or FTP site for other people to access. If you do not have access to a web or FTP site, ask on an appropriate FreeBSD mailing list for someone to host the changes for you. When working with large amounts of code, the touchy subject of copyrights also invariably comes up. &os; prefers free software licenses such as BSD or ISC. Copyleft licenses such as GPLv2 are sometimes permitted. The complete listing can be found on the core team licensing policy page. Money or Hardware We are always very happy to accept donations to further the cause of the FreeBSD Project and, in a volunteer effort like ours, a little can go a long way! Donations of hardware are also very important to expanding our list of supported peripherals since we generally lack the funds to buy such items ourselves. Donating Funds The FreeBSD Foundation is a non-profit, tax-exempt foundation established to further the goals of the FreeBSD Project. As a 501(c)3 entity, the Foundation is generally exempt from US federal income tax as well as Colorado State income tax. Donations to a tax-exempt entity are often deductible from taxable federal income. Donations may be sent in check form to:
The FreeBSD Foundation P.O. Box 20247, Boulder, CO 80308 USA
The FreeBSD Foundation is now able to accept donations through the web with PayPal. To place a donation, please visit the Foundation web site. More information about the FreeBSD Foundation can be - found in The + found in The FreeBSD Foundation -- an Introduction. To contact the Foundation by email, write to bod@FreeBSDFoundation.org. Donating Hardware donations The FreeBSD Project happily accepts donations of hardware that it can find good use for. If you are interested in donating hardware, please contact the Donations Liaison Office. Contributing to ports Adopting an unmaintained port Choosing an unmaintained port Taking over maintainership of ports that are unmaintained is a great way to get involved. Unmaintained ports are only updated and fixed when somebody volunteers to work on them. There are a large number of unmaintained ports. It is a good idea to start with adopting a port that you use regularly. Unmaintained ports have their MAINTAINER set to ports@FreeBSD.org. A list of unmaintained ports and their current errors and problem reports can be seen at the &os; Ports Monitoring System. Some ports affect a large number of others due to dependencies and slave port relationships. Generally, we want people to have some experience before they maintain such ports. You can find out whether or not a port has dependencies or slave ports by looking at a master index of ports called INDEX. (The name of the file varies by release of &os;; for instance, INDEX-8.) Some ports have conditional dependencies that are not included in a default INDEX build. We expect you to be able to recognize such ports by looking through other ports' Makefiles. How to adopt the port First make sure you understand your responsibilities as a maintainer. Also read the Porter's Handbook. Please do not commit yourself to more than you feel you can comfortably handle. You may request maintainership of any unmaintained port as soon as you wish. Simply set MAINTAINER to your own email address and send a PR (Problem Report) with the change. If the port has build errors or needs updating, you may wish to include any other changes in the same PR. This will help because many committers are less willing to assign maintainership to someone who does not have a known track record with &os;. Submitting PRs that fix build errors or update ports are the best ways to establish one. File your PR with category ports and class change-request. A committer will examine your PR, commit the changes, and finally close the PR. Sometimes this process can take a little while (committers are volunteers, too :). The challenge for port maintainers This section will give you an idea of why ports need to be maintained and outline the responsibilities of a port maintainer. Why ports require maintenance Creating a port is a once-off task. Ensuring that a port is up to date and continues to build and run requires an ongoing maintenance effort. Maintainers are the people who dedicate some of their time to meeting these goals. The foremost reason ports need maintenance is to bring the latest and greatest in third party software to the &os; community. An additional challenge is to keep individual ports working within the Ports Collection framework as it evolves. As a maintainer, you will need to manage the following challenges: New software versions and updates. New versions and updates of existing ported software become available all the time, and these need to be incorporated into the Ports Collection in order to provide up-to-date software. Changes to dependencies. If significant changes are made to the dependencies of your port, it may need to be updated so that it will continue to work correctly. Changes affecting dependent ports. If other ports depend on a port that you maintain, changes to your port may require coordination with other maintainers. Interaction with other users, maintainers and developers. Part of being a maintainer is taking on a support role. You are not expected to provide general support (but we welcome it if you choose to do so). What you should provide is a point of coordination for &os;-specific issues regarding your ports. Bug hunting. A port may be affected by bugs which are specific to &os;. You will need to investigate, find, and fix these bugs when they are reported. Thoroughly testing a port to identify problems before they make their way into the Ports Collection is even better. Changes to ports infrastructure and policy. Occasionally the systems that are used to build ports and packages are updated or a new recommendation affecting the infrastructure is made. You should be aware of these changes in case your ports are affected and require updating. Changes to the base system. &os; is under constant development. Changes to software, libraries, the kernel or even policy changes can cause flow-on change requirements to ports. Maintainer responsibilities Keep your ports up to date This section outlines the process to follow to keep your ports up to date. This is an overview. More information about upgrading a port is available in the Porter's Handbook. Watch for updates Monitor the upstream vendor for new versions, updates and security fixes for the software. Announcement mailing lists or news web pages are useful for doing this. Sometimes users will contact you and ask when your port will be updated. If you are busy with other things or for any reason just cannot update it at the moment, ask if they will help you by submitting an update. You may also receive automated email from the &os; Ports Version Check informing you that a newer version of your port's distfile is available. More information about that system (including how to stop future emails) will be provided in the message. Incorporate changes When they become available, incorporate the changes into the port. You need to be able to generate a patch between the original port and your updated port. Review and test Thoroughly review and test your changes: Build, install and test your port on as many platforms and architectures as you can. It is common for a port to work on one branch or platform and fail on another. Make sure your port's dependencies are complete. The recommended way of doing this is by installing your own ports tinderbox. See resources for more information. Check that the packing list is up to date. This involves adding in any new files and directories and removing unused entries. Verify your port using &man.portlint.1; as a guide. See resources for important information about using portlint. Consider whether changes to your port might cause any other ports to break. If this is the case, coordinate the changes with the maintainers of those ports. This is especially important if your update changes the shared library version; in this case, at the very least, the dependent ports will need to get a PORTREVISION bump so that they will automatically be upgraded by automated tools such as portmaster or &man.portupgrade.1;. Submit changes Send your update by submitting a PR with an explanation of the changes and a patch containing the differences between the original port and the updated one. Please refer to Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports for information on how to write a really good PR. Please do not submit a &man.shar.1; archive of the entire port; instead, use &man.diff.1; -ruN. In this way, committers can much more easily see exactly what changes are being made. The Porter's Handbook section on Upgrading has more information. Wait At some stage a committer will deal with your PR. It may take minutes, or it may take weeks — so please be patient. Give feedback If a committer finds a problem with your changes, they will most likely refer it back to you. A prompt response will help get your PR committed faster, and is better for maintaining a thread of conversation when trying to resolve any problems. And Finally Your changes will be committed and your port will have been updated. The PR will then be closed by the committer. That's it! Ensure your ports continue to build correctly This section is about discovering and fixing problems that stop your ports from building correctly. &os; only guarantees that the Ports Collection works on the -STABLE branches. In theory, you should be able to get by with running the latest release of each stable branch (since the ABIs are not supposed to change) but if you can run the branch, that is even better. Since the majority of &os; installations run on PC-compatible machines (what is termed the i386 architecture), we expect you to keep the port working on that architecture. We prefer that ports also work on the amd64 architecture running native. It is completely fair to ask for help if you do not have one of these machines. The usual failure modes for non-x86 machines are that the original programmers assumed that, for instance, pointers are ints, or that a relatively lax older gcc compiler was being used. More and more, application authors are reworking their code to remove these assumptions — but if the author is not actively maintaining their code, you may need to do this yourself. These are the tasks you need to perform to ensure your port is able to be built: Watch for build failures Check your mail for mail from pkg-fallout@FreeBSD.org and the distfiles scanner to see if any of the port which are failing to build are out of date. Collect information Once you are aware of a problem, collect information to help you fix it. Build errors reported by pkg-fallout are accompanied by logs which will show you where the build failed. If the failure was reported to you by a user, ask them to send you information which may help in diagnosing the problem, such as: Build logs The commands and options used to build the port (including options set in /etc/make.conf) A list of packages installed on their system as shown by &man.pkg.info.1; The version of &os; they are running as shown by &man.uname.1; -a When their ports collection was last updated When their ports tree and INDEX was last updated Investigate and find a solution Unfortunately there is no straightforward process to follow to do this. Remember, though: if you are stuck, ask for help! The &a.ports; is a good place to start, and the upstream developers are often very helpful. Submit changes Just as with updating a port, you should now incorporate changes, review and test, submit your changes in a PR, and provide feedback if required. Send patches to upstream authors In some cases, you will have to make patches to the port to make it run on FreeBSD. Some (but not all) upstream authors will accept such patches back into their code for the next release. If so, this may even help their users on other BSD-based systems as well and perhaps save duplicated effort. Please consider sending any applicable patches to the authors as a courtesy. Investigate bug reports and PRs related to your port This section is about discovering and fixing bugs. &os;-specific bugs are generally caused by assumptions about the build and runtime environments that do not apply to &os;. You are less likely to encounter a problem of this type, but it can be more subtle and difficult to diagnose. These are the tasks you need to perform to ensure your port continues to work as intended: Respond to bug reports Bugs may be reported to you through email via the Problem Report database. Bugs may also be reported directly to you by users. You should respond to PRs and other reports within 14 days, but please try not to take that long. Try to respond as soon as possible, even if it is just to say you need some more time before you can work on the PR. If you have not responded after 14 days, any committer may commit from a PR that you have not responded to via a maintainer-timeout. Collect information If the person reporting the bug has not also provided a fix, you need to collect the information that will allow you to generate one. If the bug is reproducible, you can collect most of the required information yourself. If not, ask the person who reported the bug to collect the information for you, such as: A detailed description of their actions, expected program behavior and actual behavior Copies of input data used to trigger the bug Information about their build and execution environment — for example, a list of installed packages and the output of &man.env.1; Core dumps Stack traces Eliminate incorrect reports Some bug reports may be incorrect. For example, the user may have simply misused the program; or their installed packages may be out of date and require updating. Sometimes a reported bug is not specific to &os;. In this case report the bug to the upstream developers. If the bug is within your capabilities to fix, you can also patch the port so that the fix is applied before the next upstream release. Find a solution As with build errors, you will need to sort out a fix to the problem. Again, remember to ask if you are stuck! Submit or approve changes Just as with updating a port, you should now incorporate changes, review and test, and submit your changes in a PR (or send a follow-up if a PR already exists for the problem). If another user has submitted changes in the PR, you can also send a follow-up saying whether or not you approve the changes. Providing support Part of being a maintainer is providing support — not for the software in general — but for the port and any &os;-specific quirks and problems. Users may contact you with questions, suggestions, problems and patches. Most of the time their correspondence will be specific to &os;. Occasionally you may have to invoke your skills in diplomacy, and kindly point users seeking general support to the appropriate resources. Less frequently you will encounter a person asking why the RPMs are not up to date or how can they get the software to run under Foo Linux. Take the opportunity to tell them that your port is up to date (if it is, of course!), and suggest that they try &os;. Sometimes users and developers will decide that you are a busy person whose time is valuable and do some of the work for you. For example, they might: submit a PR or send you patches to update your port, investigate and perhaps provide a fix to a PR, or otherwise submit changes to your port. In these cases your main obligation is to respond in a timely manner. Again, the timeout for non-responsive maintainers is 14 days. After this period changes may be committed unapproved. They have taken the trouble to do this for you; so please try to at least respond promptly. Then review, approve, modify or discuss their changes with them as soon as possible. If you can make them feel that their contribution is appreciated (and it should be) you will have a better chance persuading them to do more things for you in the future :-). Finding and fixing a broken port There are two really good places to find a port that needs some attention. You can use the web interface to the Problem Report database to search through and view unresolved PRs. The majority of ports PRs are updates, but with a little searching and skimming over synopses you should be able to find something interesting to work on (the sw-bug class is a good place to start). The other place is the &os; Ports Monitoring System. In particular look for unmaintained ports with build errors and ports that are marked BROKEN. It is OK to send changes for a maintained port as well, but remember to ask the maintainer in case they are already working on the problem. Once you have found a bug or problem, collect information, investigate and fix! If there is an existing PR, follow up to that. Otherwise create a new PR. Your changes will be reviewed and, if everything checks out, committed. When to call it quits As your interests and commitments change, you may find that you no longer have time to continue some (or all) of your ports contributions. That is fine! Please let us know if you are no longer using a port or have otherwise lost time or interest in being a maintainer. In this way we can go ahead and allow other people to try to work on existing problems with the port without waiting for your response. Remember, &os; is a volunteer project, so if maintaining a port is no fun any more, it is probably time to let someone else do it! In any case, the Ports Management Team (portmgr) reserves the right to reset your maintainership if you have not actively maintained your port in some time. (Currently, this is set to 3 months.) By this, we mean that there are unresolved problems or pending updates that have not been worked on during that time. Resources for ports maintainers and contributors The Porter's Handbook is your hitchhiker's guide to the ports system. Keep it handy! Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports describes how to best formulate and submit a PR. In 2005 more than eleven thousand ports PRs were submitted! Following this article will greatly assist us in reducing the time needed to handle your PRs. The Problem Report database. The FreeBSD Ports Monitoring System can show you cross-referenced information about ports such as build errors and problem reports. If you are a maintainer you can use it to check on the build status of your ports. As a contributor you can use it to find broken and unmaintained ports that need to be fixed. The FreeBSD Ports distfile scanner can show you ports for which the distfiles are not fetchable. You can check on your own ports or use it to find ports that need their MASTER_SITES updated. ports-mgmt/poudriere is the most thorough way to test a port through the entire cycle of installation, packaging, and deinstallation. Documentation is located at the poudriere home page &man.portlint.1; is an application which can be used to verify that your port conforms to many important stylistic and functional guidelines. portlint is a simple heuristic application, so you should use it only as a guide. If portlint suggests changes which seem unreasonable, consult the Porter's Handbook or ask for advice. The &a.ports; is for general ports-related discussion. It is a good place to ask for help. You can subscribe, or read and search the list archives. Reading the archives of the &a.ports-bugs; and the &a.cvs-ports; may also be of interest. Getting Started in Other Areas Looking for something interesting to get started that is not mentioned elsewhere in this article? The &os; Project has several Wiki pages containing areas within which new contributors can get ideas on how to get started. The Junior Jobs page has a list of projects that might be of interest to people just getting started in &os;, and want to work on interesting things to get their feet wet. The Ideas Page contains various "nice to have" or "interesting" things to work on in the Project.
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&os; Release Engineering November 2001 BSDCon Europe MurrayStokely I've been involved in the development of &os; based products since 1997 at Walnut Creek CDROM, BSDi, and now Wind River Systems. &os; 4.4 was the first official release of &os; that I played a significant part in.
murray@FreeBSD.org https://people.FreeBSD.org/~murray/
&tm-attrib.freebsd; &tm-attrib.intel; &tm-attrib.general; $FreeBSD$ This document is outdated and does not accurately describe the current release procedures of the &os; Release Engineering team. It is retained for historical purposes. The current procedures used by the &os; Release Engineering team are available in the &os; Release Engineering article. This paper describes the approach used by the &os; release engineering team to make production quality releases of the &os; Operating System. It details the methodology used for the official &os; releases and describes the tools available for those interested in producing customized &os; releases for corporate rollouts or commercial productization. Introduction The development of &os; is a very open process. &os; is comprised of contributions from thousands of people around the world. The &os; Project provides Subversion Subversion, http://subversion.apache.org access to the general public so that others can have access to log messages, diffs (patches) between development branches, and other productivity enhancements that formal source code management provides. This has been a huge help in attracting more talented developers to &os;. However, I think everyone would agree that chaos would soon manifest if write access to the main repository was opened up to everyone on the Internet. Therefore only a select group of nearly 300 people are given write access to the Subversion repository. These committers FreeBSD committers are usually the people who do the bulk of &os; development. An elected Core Team &os; Core Team of developers provide some level of direction over the project. The rapid pace of &os; development makes the main development branch unsuitable for the everyday use by the general public. In particular, stabilizing efforts are required for polishing the development system into a production quality release. To solve this conflict, development continues on several parallel tracks. The main development branch is the HEAD or trunk of our Subversion tree, known as &os;-CURRENT or -CURRENT for short. A set of more stable branches are maintained, known as &os;-STABLE or -STABLE for short. All branches live in a master Subversion repository maintained by the &os; Project. &os;-CURRENT is the bleeding-edge of &os; development where all new changes first enter the system. &os;-STABLE is the development branch from which major releases are made. Changes go into this branch at a different pace, and with the general assumption that they have first gone into &os;-CURRENT and have been thoroughly tested by our user community. The term stable in the name of the branch refers to the presumed Application Binary Interface stability, which is promised by the project. This means that a user application compiled on an older version of the system from the same branch works on a newer system from the same branch. The ABI stability has improved greatly from the compared to previous releases. In most cases, binaries from the older STABLE systems run unmodified on newer systems, including HEAD, assuming that the system management interfaces are not used. In the interim period between releases, weekly snapshots are built automatically by the &os; Project build machines and made available for download from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/. The widespread availability of binary release snapshots, and the tendency of our user community to keep up with -STABLE development with Subversion and make buildworld Rebuilding "world" helps to keep &os;-STABLE in a very reliable condition even before the quality assurance activities ramp up pending a major release. In addition to installation ISO snapshots, weekly virtual machine images are also provided for use with VirtualBox, qemu, or other popular emulation software. The virtual machine images can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/VM-IMAGES/. The virtual machine images are approximately 150MB &man.xz.1; compressed, and contain a 10GB sparse filesystem when attached to a virtual machine. Bug reports and feature requests are continuously submitted by users throughout the release cycle. Problems reports are entered into our Bugzilla database through the web interface provided at https://www.freebsd.org/support/bugreports.html. To service our most conservative users, individual release branches were introduced with &os; 4.3. These release branches are created shortly before a final release is made. After the release goes out, only the most critical security fixes and additions are merged onto the release branch. In addition to source updates via Subversion, binary patchkits are available to keep systems on the releng/X.Y branches updated. What this article describes The following sections of this article describe: The different phases of the release engineering process leading up to the actual system build. The actual build process. How the base release may be extended by third parties. Some of the lessons learned through the release of &os; 4.4. Future directions of development. Release Process New releases of &os; are released from the -STABLE branch at approximately four month intervals. The &os; release process begins to ramp up 70-80 days before the anticipated release date when the release engineer sends an email to the development mailing lists to remind developers that they only have 15 days to integrate new changes before the code freeze. During this time, many developers perform what have become known as MFC sweeps. MFC stands for Merge From CURRENT and it describes the process of merging a tested change from our -CURRENT development branch to our -STABLE branch. Project policy requires any change to be first applied to trunk, and merged to the -STABLE branches after sufficient external testing was done by -CURRENT users (developers are expected to extensively test the change before committing to -CURRENT, but it is impossible for a person to exercise all usages of the general-purpose operating system). Minimal MFC period is 3 days, which is typically used only for trivial or critical bugfixes. Code Review Sixty days before the anticipated release, the source repository enters a code freeze. During this time, all commits to the -STABLE branch must be approved by &a.re;. The approval process is technically enforced by a pre-commit hook. The kinds of changes that are allowed during this period include: Bug fixes. Documentation updates. Security-related fixes of any kind. Minor changes to device drivers, such as adding new Device IDs. Driver updates from the vendors. Any additional change that the release engineering team feels is justified, given the potential risk. Shortly after the code freeze is started, a BETA1 image is built and released for widespread testing. During the code freeze, at least one beta image or release candidate is released every two weeks until the final release is ready. During the days preceeding the final release, the release engineering team is in constant communication with the security-officer team, the documentation maintainers, and the port maintainers to ensure that all of the different components required for a successful release are available. After the quality of the BETA images is satisfying enough, and no large and potentially risky changes are planned, the release branch is created and Release Candidate (RC) images are built from the release branch, instead of the BETA images from the STABLE branch. Also, the freeze on the STABLE branch is lifted and release branch enters a hard code freeze where it becomes much harder to justify new changes to the system unless a serious bug-fix or security issue is involved. Final Release Checklist When several BETA images have been made available for widespread testing and all major issues have been resolved, the final release polishing can begin. Creating the Release Branch In all examples below, $FSVN refers to the location of the &os; Subversion repository, svn+ssh://svn.FreeBSD.org/base/. The layout of &os; branches in Subversion is described in the Committer's Guide. The first step in creating a branch is to identify the revision of the stable/X sources that you want to branch from. &prompt.root; svn log -v $FSVN/stable/9 The next step is to create the release branch &prompt.root; svn cp $FSVN/stable/9@REVISION $FSVN/releng/9.2 This branch can be checked out: &prompt.root; svn co $FSVN/releng/9.2 src Creating the releng branch and release tags is done by the Release Engineering Team. &os; Development Branch &os; 3.x STABLE Branch &os; 4.x STABLE Branch &os; 5.x STABLE Branch &os; 6.x STABLE Branch &os; 7.x STABLE Branch &os; 8.x STABLE Branch &os; 9.x STABLE Branch Bumping up the Version Number Before the final release can be tagged, built, and released, the following files need to be modified to reflect the correct version of &os;: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors/chapter.xml doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.xml doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/cgi/ports.cgi ports/Tools/scripts/release/config doc/share/xml/freebsd.ent src/Makefile.inc1 src/UPDATING src/gnu/usr.bin/groff/tmac/mdoc.local src/release/Makefile src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/share/xml/release.dsl src/release/doc/share/examples/Makefile.relnotesng src/release/doc/share/xml/release.ent src/sys/conf/newvers.sh src/sys/sys/param.h src/usr.sbin/pkg_install/add/main.c doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/search/opensearch/man.xml The release notes and errata files also need to be adjusted for the new release (on the release branch) and truncated appropriately (on the stable/current branch): src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/relnotes/common/new.xml src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/errata/article.xml Sysinstall should be updated to note the number of available ports and the amount of disk space required for the Ports Collection. &os; Ports Collection https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports This information is currently kept in src/usr.sbin/sysinstall/dist.c. After the release has been built, a number of files should be updated to announce the release to the world. These files are relative to head/ within the doc/ subversion tree. share/images/articles/releng/branches-relengX.pic head/share/xml/release.ent en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/releases/* en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/releng/index.xml share/xml/news.xml Additionally, update the BSD Family Tree file: src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree Creating the Release Tag When the final release is ready, the following command will create the release/9.2.0 tag. &prompt.root; svn cp $FSVN/releng/9.2 $FSVN/release/9.2.0 The Documentation and Ports managers are responsible for tagging their respective trees with the tags/RELEASE_9_2_0 tag. When the Subversion svn cp command is used to create a release tag, this identifies the source at a specific point in time. By creating tags, we ensure that future release builders will always be able to use the exact same source we used to create the official &os; Project releases. Release Building &os; releases can be built by anyone with a fast machine and access to a source repository. (That should be everyone, since we offer Subversion access ! See the Subversion section in the Handbook for details.) The only special requirement is that the &man.md.4; device must be available. If the device is not loaded into your kernel, then the kernel module should be automatically loaded when &man.mdconfig.8; is executed during the boot media creation phase. All of the tools necessary to build a release are available from the Subversion repository in src/release. These tools aim to provide a consistent way to build &os; releases. A complete release can actually be built with only a single command, including the creation of ISO images suitable for burning to CDROM or DVD, and an FTP install directory. &man.release.7; fully documents the src/release/generate-release.sh script which is used to build a release. generate-release.sh is a wrapper around the Makefile target: make release. Building a Release &man.release.7; documents the exact commands required to build a &os; release. The following sequences of commands can build an 9.2.0 release: &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/release &prompt.root; sh generate-release.sh release/9.2.0 /local3/release After running these commands, all prepared release files are available in /local3/release/R directory. The release Makefile can be broken down into several distinct steps. Creation of a sanitized system environment in a separate directory hierarchy with make installworld. Checkout from Subversion of a clean version of the system source, documentation, and ports into the release build hierarchy. Population of /etc and /dev in the chrooted environment. chroot into the release build hierarchy, to make it harder for the outside environment to taint this build. make world in the chrooted environment. Build of Kerberos-related binaries. Build GENERIC kernel. Creation of a staging directory tree where the binary distributions will be built and packaged. Build and installation of the documentation toolchain needed to convert the documentation source (SGML) into HTML and text documents that will accompany the release. Build and installation of the actual documentation (user manuals, tutorials, release notes, hardware compatibility lists, and so on.) Package up distribution tarballs of the binaries and sources. Create FTP installation hierarchy. (optionally) Create ISO images for CDROM/DVD media. For more information about the release build infrastructure, please see &man.release.7;. It is important to remove any site-specific settings from /etc/make.conf. For example, it would be unwise to distribute binaries that were built on a system with CPUTYPE set to a specific processor. Contributed Software (<quote>ports</quote>) The &os; Ports collection is a collection of over &os.numports; third-party software packages available for &os;. The &a.portmgr; is responsible for maintaining a consistent ports tree that can be used to create the binary packages that accompany official &os; releases. Release ISOs Starting with &os; 4.4, the &os; Project decided to release all four ISO images that were previously sold on the BSDi/Wind River Systems/FreeBSD Mall official CDROM distributions. Each of the four discs must contain a README.TXT file that explains the contents of the disc, a CDROM.INF file that provides meta-data for the disc so that &man.sysinstall.8; can validate and use the contents, and a filename.txt file that provides a manifest for the disc. This manifest can be created with a simple command: /stage/cdrom&prompt.root; find . -type f | sed -e 's/^\.\///' | sort > filename.txt The specific requirements of each CD are outlined below. Disc 1 The first disc is almost completely created by make release. The only changes that should be made to the disc1 directory are the addition of a tools directory, and as many popular third party software packages as will fit on the disc. The tools directory contains software that allow users to create installation floppies from other operating systems. This disc should be made bootable so that users of modern PCs do not need to create installation floppy disks. If a custom kernel of &os; is to be included, then &man.sysinstall.8; and &man.release.7; must be updated to include installation instructions. The relevant code is contained in src/release and src/usr.sbin/sysinstall. Specifically, the file src/release/Makefile, and dist.c, dist.h, menus.c, install.c, and Makefile will need to be updated under src/usr.sbin/sysinstall. Optionally, you may choose to update sysinstall.8. Disc 2 The second disc is also largely created by make release. This disc contains a live filesystem that can be used from &man.sysinstall.8; to troubleshoot a &os; installation. This disc should be bootable and should also contain a compressed copy of the CVS repository in the CVSROOT directory and commercial software demos in the commerce directory. Multi-volume support Sysinstall supports multiple volume package installations. This requires that each disc have an INDEX file containing all of the packages on all volumes of a set, along with an extra field that indicates which volume that particular package is on. Each volume in the set must also have the CD_VOLUME variable set in the cdrom.inf file so that sysinstall can tell which volume is which. When a user attempts to install a package that is not on the current disc, sysinstall will prompt the user to insert the appropriate one. Distribution FTP Sites When the release has been thoroughly tested and packaged for distribution, the master FTP site must be updated. The official &os; public FTP sites are all mirrors of a master server that is open only to other FTP sites. This site is known as ftp-master. When the release is ready, the following files must be modified on ftp-master: /pub/FreeBSD/releases/arch/X.Y-RELEASE/ The installable FTP directory as output from make release. /pub/FreeBSD/ports/arch/packages-X.Y-release/ The complete package build for this release. /pub/FreeBSD/releases/arch/X.Y-RELEASE/tools A symlink to ../../../tools. /pub/FreeBSD/releases/arch/X.Y-RELEASE/packages A symlink to ../../../ports/arch/packages-X.Y-release. /pub/FreeBSD/releases/arch/ISO-IMAGES/X.Y/X.Y-RELEASE-arch-*.iso The ISO images. The * is disc1, disc2, etc. Only if there is a disc1 and there is an alternative first installation CD (for example a stripped-down install with no windowing system) there may be a mini as well. For more information about the distribution mirror architecture of the &os; FTP sites, please see the Mirroring &os; article. It may take many hours to two days after updating ftp-master before a majority of the Tier-1 FTP sites have the new software depending on whether or not a package set got loaded at the same time. It is imperative that the release engineers coordinate with the &a.mirror-announce; before announcing the general availability of new software on the FTP sites. Ideally the release package set should be loaded at least four days prior to release day. The release bits should be loaded between 24 and 48 hours before the planned release time with other file permissions turned off. This will allow the mirror sites to download it but the general public will not be able to download it from the mirror sites. Mail should be sent to &a.mirror-announce; at the time the release bits get posted saying the release has been staged and giving the time that the mirror sites should begin allowing access. Be sure to include a time zone with the time, for example make it relative to GMT. CD-ROM Replication Coming soon: Tips for sending &os; ISOs to a replicator and quality assurance measures to be taken. Extensibility Although &os; forms a complete operating system, there is nothing that forces you to use the system exactly as we have packaged it up for distribution. We have tried to design the system to be as extensible as possible so that it can serve as a platform that other commercial products can be built on top of. The only rule we have about this is that if you are going to distribute &os; with non-trivial changes, we encourage you to document your enhancements! The &os; community can only help support users of the software we provide. We certainly encourage innovation in the form of advanced installation and administration tools, for example, but we cannot be expected to answer questions about it. Scripting <command>sysinstall</command> The &os; system installation and configuration tool, &man.sysinstall.8;, can be scripted to provide automated installs for large sites. This functionality can be used in conjunction with &intel; PXE &url.books.handbook;/network-pxe-nfs.html to bootstrap systems from the network. Lessons Learned from &os; 4.4 The release engineering process for 4.4 formally began on August 1st, 2001. After that date all commits to the RELENG_4 branch of &os; had to be explicitly approved by the &a.re;. The first release candidate for the x86 architecture was released on August 16, followed by 4 more release candidates leading up to the final release on September 18th. The security officer was very involved in the last week of the process as several security issues were found in the earlier release candidates. A total of over 500 emails were sent to the &a.re; in little over a month. Our user community has made it very clear that the security and stability of a &os; release should not be sacrificed for any self-imposed deadlines or target release dates. The &os; Project has grown tremendously over its lifetime and the need for standardized release engineering procedures has never been more apparent. This will become even more important as &os; is ported to new platforms. Future Directions It is imperative for our release engineering activities to scale with our growing userbase. Along these lines we are working very hard to document the procedures involved in producing &os; releases. Parallelism - Certain portions of the release build are actually embarrassingly parallel. Most of the tasks are very I/O intensive, so having multiple high-speed disk drives is actually more important than using multiple processors in speeding up the make release process. If multiple disks are used for different hierarchies in the &man.chroot.2; environment, then the CVS checkout of the ports and doc trees can be happening simultaneously as the make world on another disk. Using a RAID solution (hardware or software) can significantly decrease the overall build time. Cross-building releases - Building IA-64 or Alpha release on x86 hardware? make TARGET=ia64 release. Regression Testing - We need better automated correctness testing for &os;. Installation Tools - Our installation program has long since outlived its intended life span. Several projects are under development to provide a more advanced installation mechanism. The libh project was one such project that aimed to provide an intelligent new package framework and GUI installation program. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Jordan Hubbard for giving me the opportunity to take on some of the release engineering responsibilities for &os; 4.4 and also for all of his work throughout the years making &os; what it is today. Of course the release would not have been possible without all of the release-related work done by &a.asami.email;, &a.steve.email;, &a.bmah.email;, &a.nik.email;, &a.obrien.email;, &a.kris.email;, &a.jhb.email; and the rest of the &os; development community. I would also like to thank &a.rgrimes.email;, &a.phk.email;, and others who worked on the release engineering tools in the very early days of &os;. This article was influenced by release engineering documents from the CSRG Marshall Kirk McKusick, Michael J. Karels, and Keith Bostic: The Release Engineering of 4.3BSD , the NetBSD Project , NetBSD Developer Documentation: Release Engineering http://www.NetBSD.org/developers/releng/index.html , and John Baldwin's proposed release engineering process notes. John Baldwin's &os; Release Engineering Proposal - http://people.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/docs/releng.txt + https://people.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/docs/releng.txt