A note from the maintainer

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>. You don't have to be subscribed to send messages. The convention on the list is to keep everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me, I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting, but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise. Please do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case. Messages getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

is still available.  An alternative

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

will become usable once it catches up with old messages.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <> stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode. Their logs are available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit organization (https://sfconservancy.org/). To reach a committee of liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop your bug report with just "git does not work". "I used git in this way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git in this way, and X happend, which is broken". It often is that git is correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>. This is a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.

* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html

* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and ready to be used in a production setting. Every now and then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch. They used to be named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.9 done on June 13th, 2016. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from "master" at that point. Obvious and safe fixes after a feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from it. Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first, several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance of last-minute issues. The maintenance releases used to be named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature release). These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.9.3" is the third maintenance release for the "2.9" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch. This branch is also merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master". It might not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it is merged to "master". Please help this process by building & using the "next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen. There is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch. This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more. The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well documented and they often need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are currently in flight. Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next" usually will not be either. After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next release, nor even in any future release. There were cases that topics needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master", or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".

* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes should be sent. As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system, please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two even have different directory structures).

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Mostly caught up, I injected 33 more today which were cross-posted (which tripped up some of my anti-spam rules) or simply missed by gmane.

There may be more in some personal archives gmane doesn't have...

I've also added NNTP links (including gmane) to the footer in public-inbox.org/git

Some of the generated links have %40 in them which is the URI escape for '@'. I'll make a change to keep the '@' unescaped to lessen confusion.

Due to the use of SQLite as a stable store for NNTP article numbers; public-inbox can also do partial matching (up to 100 results, currently) to help correct legitimate mistakes; but I wouldn't rely on it too much:

	public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440

On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 10:42:55PM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:

Is there an easy way to get _just_ the list of message-ids you are storing (I know I can download the whole archive, but it's big)?

Then I can cross-reference with my archive. I doubt I'll have anything significant that you don't. My archive of the early days was pulled from gmane, though I have been collecting steadily via mailing list delivery since 2007 or so.

-Peff

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

XHDR (or HDR) over NNTP should do it (that's how I checked
against gmane):
--------8<-----
use Net::NNTP;
my $nntp = Net::NNTP->new($ENV{NNTPSERVER} || 'news.public-inbox.org');
my ($num, $first, $last) = $nntp->group('inbox.comp.version-control.git');
my $batch = 10000;
my $i;
for ($i = $first; $i < $last; $i += $batch) {
	my $j = $i + $batch - 1;
	$j = $last if $j > $last;
	my $num2mid = $nntp->xhdr('Message-ID', "$i-$j");
	for my $n ($i..$j) {
		defined(my $mid = $num2mid->{$n}) or next;
		print "$mid\n";
	}
}

# and I forgot to optimize XHDR/HDR further in public-inbox-nntpd. # Oh well, it seems to work, at least.

What's odd is there's some messages with two Message-ID fields from gmane from the old days, too. I'll dig a bit another time.

On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 09:04:32AM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:

Thanks, that's perfect.

I collected the message-ids from my archive. Interestingly, I had a dozen or so that did not have message-ids at all. I think most of them are from patches that put the "From " line in the body, like this one:

  http://public-inbox.org/git/20070311033833.GB10781@spearce.org/

and then they got corrupted on a round-trip through one of the bad mbox formats (probably downloading from gmane, I'd guess; the export there uses mbox, and I use maildir myself, so it probably got split badly years ago). Anyway, public-inbox seems to get this case right, which is good.

I had several hundred message ids that you didn't. About half of them were spam or other junk. I weeded them out manually (mostly by picking through the subjects, so possibly there's some error). The end result is 279 messages that I think are legitimate that you don't have.

I'll send them to you off-list, as the mbox is about 300K, which the list will reject.

-Peff

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Yes, I was somewhat careful to check for proper mboxes from gmane; I just missed entire ranges :x

What's also interesting about the thread you highlighed is the extra '<>' when you started that thread; and I have a bug where I strip off an extra '>' which needs to be fixed...

I wonder if I should make "editorial" changes to fixup user bugs, but then there's also bunch of messages which are replies to <y> because git-send-email had usability problems back in the day...

Thanks, should all be imported.

The one which started the thread belonging to <loom.20100716T103549-783@post.gmane.org> was really iffy, but I kept it; as well as an "unsubscribe" one; I guess those people are shamed for life :)

  git cat-file blob HEAD:b7/5bb577d76487bc9aebf0656d4e03eff22049f4

is totally legit, but doesn't seem to show up properly, so there's another bug I need to fix. For the moment, the following also works:

	public-inbox.org/git/b75bb577d76487bc9aebf0656d4e03eff22049f4/
(but I guess it was reposted as <26299.4828321554$1213013668@news.gmane.org>

Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> wrote:

Oops, missed one which was missing X-Mailing-List (causing it to not get imported) and had "X-No-Archive: yes" set; which meant I couldn't get it from gmane this year.

Hmm... XNAY defeats the point of public-inbox (and probably the point of public-to-all mailing lists); so I don't think it's worth honoring.

On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 02:12:34AM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:

I didn't even think to look for that header. It looks like it's basically all one guy. I would argue that it should not be honored for the git dev list, if only because those emails are a record of the provenance of patches. The Signed-off-by is a certification that the patch is OK to submit, but it's presumably worth more with an audit trail including the email headers.

(Also, I have always found it a little silly to post publicly with a "please don't anybody record this!" header).

-Peff

On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 01:27:06AM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:

Oh, that's interesting. It's not in the message that started the thread; the bug is in the in-reply-to headers of the patches themselves. I don't remember what I was using to send patches back then. It might have been send-email, and I suspect I did:

  git send-email --in-reply-to='<whatever>'

after cutting-and-pasting '<whatever>' from the cover letter.

I wouldn't go too far in editorial changes. I made a few when skimming the messages I just sent for spam, and dropped some empty messages, or "unsubscribe me" ones. But it's not worth the human effort to go back and scrub list archives from 10 years ago.

Fixing up an extra "<>" is easily done once in your parsing scripts, though, and I'd be surprised if I'm the only one to have made that mistake.

I think I exercised editorial control over similar "your software is now listed in our archive!" messages in what I sent. But yeah, there's going to be some spam and some cruft in the archive. It's just a fact of life. The solution is good searching and organizing tools to find the signal you're looking for, not to make sure the noise hits zero.

Heh, yeah, I saw that one (and I think it broke some of my initial scripting, which foolishly assumed nobody had message-ids with spaces in them).

-Peff

From: "Eric Wong" <e@80x24.org>

There were a number of messages that were listed by gmane as being in the various Git for Windows lists such as msysgit, especially when the messages went to both lists (as the issue had common cause) that failed to get onto the regualr gmane list.

Are these something that has been included?

Philip

A quick search on a possible message gave https://public-inbox.org/git/55BF6808.1000500@web.de/ which has no parent, but that parent actually only went to the msysgit list, so no real surprise there, but I do remember some other cases that were on list - I just can't find them at the moment :-(.

Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org> wrote:

If they were on both lists, yes, gmane seems to miss some of those messages, unfortunately.

If a message was only posted exclusively on other lists, it should stay there and it's archives. public-inbox provides a way to lookup external messages by Message-ID for this reason.

Is there a way to lookup messages by Message-ID from the msysgit archives? I could add it to the existing list of alternate Message-ID lookup services:

  https://public-inbox.org/meta/20160814054731.26194-1-e@80x24.org/

GoogleGroups doesn't seem usable without JavaScript at all, unfortunately :<

I don't think the msysgit archives would be too large and I wouldn't mind hosting them myself. But, users on GoogleGroups may not be used to our conventions and not appreciate having their unobfuscated addresses exposed or reply-to-all...

I will probably add an option to support centralized lists to public-inbox sometime, though. I don't like centralization, but completely inaccessible archives are worse.