[vtk-developers] Developer guidlines required

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

hi,

As you are aware before I make any changes to the CVS tree I send in a
message to the devel list.  However, before I start doing anything I
need some information:

  (1) Not everyone reports what they do or what changes they make or
  want to make.  So is this a good thing that I am doing or am I just
  wasting everyone's bandwidth?

  (2) I dont know how verbose I should make the log entry.  Do you
  have any rules of thumb?  Also, I see logs like

  ENH: Objective C subclass of NSWindow to act as a ...
  or
  ERR: division by zero fixed in calculation of mean and ...

  Now what are the 'ENH' and 'ERR' supposed to mean and when does one
  use them.  Are there other tags like this?

  I am aware of the Coding Standards
  http://www.kitware.com/vtkhtml/vtkdata/CodeStyle.html and also the
  copyright issues etc.  Are there others?  I did look around quite a
  bit.

  (3) How do developers actually maintain and run their code.  I mean
  how exactly do you actually build the CVS tree?  Do you build it
  right on the checked out CVS tree and use appropriate .cvisignore
  files?  Or do you usually use a separate build dir?  If you build it
  on the checked out CVS tree how do you handle a modified user.make
  (and not accidentally check it in)?  

  (4) How long(approximately) do the regression tests take to run on a
  machine equivalent to a P III 450 with about 128MB RAM?

  (5) Do you all run regression tests before you check in _anything_?
  Or do you make the change and then track the nightly and continuous
  build pages and then change things appropriately?

  (6) How do you handle multiple versions of VTK.  Right now I have
  vtk-3.2 installed (system wide).  When you build the CVS tree and
  run the tests etc., do you simply set LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or something
  else under windows) and test?  What do you folks think is the best
  way to all this.

  (7) Currently VTK doesnt version the libraries.  Why is this?  Cant
  we add a library version or something?


I am sorry if this is a FAQ or something but i couldnt find any
information on this and need help.

thanks,
prabhu