VTK/Git/Develop Release

VTK 6 had several major changes, including the build system and library layout changes. Given the scope of the changes, it is important to support the 5.10 release for longer to help those who are not yet ready to port to VTK 6+ make progress. At the same time, we have decided not to encourage continued development on the branch and wish to prevent having the 5.10 branch diverge further from 6.x

With this in mind, we have added some software development infrastructure that enables developers to maintain the 5.10 branch. Specifically we now have a release-5.10 branch in the VTK repository, Mac, Windows and Linux dashboard submitters on the branch, and a workflow by which proposed changes are shared and reviewed before merging onto the branch. The branch was started from the v5.10.1 tag and is only intended for merging critical bug fixes, and conservative patches to allow VTK 5.10 to continue working on new platforms and with new compilers until a majority of projects have made the switch to 6.x.

Submitting Patches

Any topic intended for the release-5.10 branch should be branched from the tip of this branch. This can be achieved with the following in a VTK source tree:

git fetch gerrit
git checkout release-5.10
git checkout -b my-backported-bugfix

You can then work in that topic as you would normally, cherry picking commits from the master (6.x) branch or making changes and committing them. Please bear in mind that we will only consider conservative fixes/changes intended to fix bugs or compiler errors. These should already be present in master, and no new features will be considered for inclusion.

Reviewing and Submitting Changes

The normal set of core reviewers can be asked to review, but a much smaller set of people has submit privileges. At present this is limited to Dave DeMarle and Marcus D. Hanwell but the list may be expanded in the future. The topics are not tested by CDash@Home or the continuous submitters but nightly dashboard tests from mac, windows and linux machines are present.

In order to push a topic for review do the following while in the topic:

git push gerrit HEAD:refs/for/release-5.10/my-backported-bugfix

Where my-backported-bugfix is the name of the topic as it will appear in Gerrit. Please let us know on the VTK developers list if you experience any problems in submitting changes.