Thunderbird/Students/StatusUpdates/2010-02-26

This week’s Random Notes

Patch Development Process

A little help for the development and submission of your bug fixes.

First, about mercurial. Mercurial repositories have both a local repository and a remote repository. When you commit, you are making changes to the local repository. To update the remote repository, you have to do a push, which you don’t have rights to do, so don’t worry about messing anything up! Even if you do something drastic to your own repository, you can revert the changes.

Before You Begin

• You should install and use the pbranch addon for mercurial. This will help you track changes across multiple directories.
• get the master repo.

hg clone <repo>

• create a pbranch for our changes.

hg pnew <branch-name>

While developing

Be sure to commit your changes early and often. This is the whole principle of a versioning system!

• hack hack hack
• Make sure we've changed what we thought.

hg diff

• commit the changes to our branch.

hg commit  

• repeat the previous three lines as needed.

Posting Your Patch

When it's time to post your patch:

• move back to the default branch.

hg update default

• pull in the changes from the main repo and update our working copy.

hg pull -u

• Merge the changes into our branches.

hg pmerge --all

• move back into our branch

hg update <branch-name>

• Save the diff between the changes we made and the main repo.

hg pdiff > filename.diff

Then, attach that patch to the bug, and you're done.

For more info:

http://weblog.latte.ca/blake/tech/thunderbird/mercurial

http://weblog.latte.ca/blake/tech/thunderbird/pbranch

Status Updates

Who’s writing the blog post this week?

Evan Stratford