> Many projects have a file called CONTRIBUTE. I think we should do this > also. There a many things that could go into it, but in particular we > could stress that new features should be documented (or at the least > noted in NEWS). Perhaps it should be made as a condition of the > commit. > > I don't understand what you are proposing; the proposal is incomplete. > Perhaps you are trying to solve the problem which we have already > solved by marking +++ in etc/NEWS.
I am proposing that developers always document the changes they make. This often happens but its not always the case. The most common example of not updating documentation is adding an argument to a lisp function. Adding items to etc/NEWS is not immediately obvious to new developers and only mentioned in an ad hoc manner. The CONTRIBUTE file is not just about documentation, it mentions coding standards, copyright assignment, mailing lists, how to submit a patch etc. Some of these are described in the manual but not with a regular contributor in mind. In GDB I read CONTRIBUTE first, so I knew what was wanted. In Emacs I just stumbled along. -- Nick http://www.inet.net.nz/~nickrob _______________________________________________ emacs-pretest-bug mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-pretest-bug
