Committer's Guide

The FreeBSD Documentation Project

$FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/article.sgml,v 1.290 2010/07/31 10:39:08 pgj Exp $

This document provides information for the FreeBSD 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 FreeBSD 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 Section 14 for more information.

This document may also be of interest to members of the FreeBSD community who want to learn more about how the project works.


Table of Contents
1 Administrative Details
2 Commit Bit Types
3 Version Control System Operations
4 Conventions and Traditions
5 Preferred License for New Files
6 Developer Relations
7 GNATS
8 Who's Who
9 SSH Quick-Start Guide
10 Coverity Prevent® Availability for FreeBSD Committers
11 The FreeBSD Committers' Big List of Rules
12 Support for Multiple Architectures
13 Ports Specific FAQ
14 Issues Specific To Developers Who Are Not Committers
15 Perks of the Job
16 Miscellaneous Questions

1 Administrative Details

Main CVS Repository Host ncvs.FreeBSD.org
Main Subversion Repository Host svn.FreeBSD.org
Login Methods ssh(1), protocol 2 only
Main CVSROOT ncvs.FreeBSD.org:/home/ncvs (although also see Section 3).
Main Subversion Root svn+ssh://svn.FreeBSD.org/base (although also see Section 3).
Main CVS Repository Meisters Peter Wemm and Simon L. Nielsen , as well as Josef Karthauser and Joe Marcus Clarke for ports/
Problem Report Database administrators Gavin Atkinson Mark Linimon , Remko Lodder , and Volker Werth .
Mailing Lists FreeBSD doc/ developers mailing list, FreeBSD doc/ committer's mailing list; FreeBSD ports/ developers mailing list, FreeBSD ports/ committer's mailing list; FreeBSD src/ developers mailing list, FreeBSD src/ committer's mailing list. (Each project repository has its own -developers and -committers mailing lists. Archives for these lists may be found in files /home/mail/repository-name-developers-archive and /home/mail/repository-name-committers-archive on the FreeBSD.org cluster.)
Core Team monthly reports /home/core/public/monthly-reports on the FreeBSD.org cluster.
Noteworthy CVSup Tags RELENG_6 (6.X-STABLE), RELENG_7 (7.X-STABLE), RELENG_8 (8.X-STABLE), HEAD (-CURRENT)
Noteworthy SVN Branches stable/6 (6.X-STABLE), stable/7 (7.X-STABLE), stable/8 (8.X-STABLE), head (-CURRENT)

It is required that you use ssh(1) or telnet(1) with Kerberos 5 to connect to the project hosts. For ssh(1) only protocol 2 is allowed. These are generally more secure than plain telnet(1) or rlogin(1) since credential negotiation will always be encrypted. All traffic is encrypted by default with ssh(1). With utilities like ssh-agent(1) and scp(1) also available, ssh(1) is also far more convenient. If you do not know anything about ssh(1), please see Section 9.