[postgis-devel] Committer Guidelines review

[rmrodriguez at carto.com]

Some more notes, I didn't want to edit it directly:

> To accomplish Guidelines standards, we have implemented the use of editorconfig. Our repo as of version 2.4 now contains a .editorconfig file which editors configured with editorconfig support abide by.

In Postgis 3.0 we also include a clang-format. This can be used inside
an editor or with a git pre-hook, and `git clang-format` works for me
too.


> updating the CREDITS and authors.git file

Do we still want to keep the authors.git file? Recently there was a
push with a patch (997896338035a0264566dde529ce28b0b69c9f63) which
isn't in the file and I think it's ok. So maybe we can drop it too
(provided it's not needed for mirroring).

> Never commit new features to a stable branch without permission of the PSC or release manager. Normally only fixes should go into stable branches.

I now this isn't new at all, but I've been breaking this point a lot
since I've never asked for permission. Do we really need it?

> spike branch (those in the spike/username area are to be used for experimentation or for major code refactoring that will destabilize the master After such experimentation is deemed stable, this can then be merged into the master after approval from PSC members

Do we still have those?


> A list of all project committers will be kept in the main postgis directory in a file called (CREDITS) listing for each committer. This will be the responsibility of the PSC to ensure:

Not true any more, they are in
http://postgis.net/docs/manual-dev/postgis_introduction.html#credits


> Currently the list of those areas is :

> postgresql ( https://www.postgresql.org)
> geos ( http://geos.osgeo.org)
> proj ( https://proj.org)
> gdal ( https://gdal.org)

We also depend, optionally, on json-c, protobuf-c and sfcgal.

> It is important to the PostGIS users, developers and the OSGeo foundation to avoid contributing any code to the project without it being clearly licensed under the project license.

When I introduced wagyu, which has a different but compatible license,
I moved that code into deps/, and later I moved uthash there too.
Maybe we should consider policy to store whole external files there
explaining the license, where they come from and it's current release,
and keep smaller snippets of code where they are used (as of now).

> When substantial contributions are added to a file (such as substantial patches) the author/contributor should be added to the list of copyright holders for the file.

Can we define what a substantial patch is? I don't think I've added
myself to any file and I wonder if I should start doing that.

> It is the responsibility of the document lead to ensure when new enhancements are added or breaking changes are made, these are noted in the trunk/NEWS or relevant branch/NEWS as soon as conveniently possible. The note should include the trac # (unless a major feature with many tickets) and contributors to the feature/change.

I think this should be the responsibility of the commiter and done at
the same time the changes are pushed.


Regards
-- 
Raúl Marín Rodríguez
carto.com