ITK/Contribute

Short guide for best practices process for contributing to ITK.

Step by step complete documentation provided at

How to develop new patches http://www.itk.org/Wiki/ITK/Git/Develop

Bugs/Feature enhancements best practices guide

1. Determine if the contribution is already listed in the bug tracker: http://issues.itk.org
2. Add proposed contribution (if necessary) and assign it to yourself (NOTE THE BUG ID link i.e. ITK-2287)
3. Create a new branch called "ITK-2287" from the updated git ITK master branch
4. Make proposed changes on branch "ITK-2287", thoroughly test changes, submit dashboard indicating (NOTE THE DASHBOARD link )
5. Merge ITK-2287 branch into master, commit changes with a comment that includes both the BUGID and link to dashboard indicating that the contribution introduces no new errors.
6. Close the JIRA issue, and include the commit hash key as a comment when closing.

Example

To update the ITK version number, the follow process could be followed:

Create a JIRA issue stating what you want to accomplish. Assign issue to yourself.

git fetch origin
git checkout master
git branch ITK-2287
git checkout ITK-2287
vim CMakeLists.txt   # Edit to change the version number
git add CMakeLists.txt
git commit  -m"BUG:  Issue resolved for bug ITK-2287"
git checkout master
git merge ITK-2287
git push origin
git branch -d ITK-2287

Close the JIRA issue with reference to the commit hash key.

Changing commit history

Git has some powerful tools to refactor the commit history. For example,

git commit --amend

can be used to change the content or commit message from the last commit.

git rebase -i

can be used to merge incremental commits into logical units.

These can be very convenient functions, but they should only be used on a local repository before the changes have been published to a public location.