The XDP collaboration project

This git repository is a work-in-progress workspace for collaborating on the XDP project. It provides an easy and git-diff trackable way to share notes, benchmarks and work-in-progress items.

Emacs setup and tips

Since the notes in this repository are kept in Emacs org-mode, spending a bit of time getting familiar with the setup and workflow is probably worthwhile.

Project management with org-mode

For project management in org-mode, we are heavily influenced by the setup described by Bernt Hansen in this document. There is a setup file in org-setup.el which contains setup code to configure Emacs to support the project management workflow described by Bernt. We have a few modifications to the workflow:

• We don’t use time clocking on tasks
• We’ve added a notion of task (or project) ownership, to filter tasks owned by others. Set the OWNER property on a task or project to claim ownership, which will filter the task from other’s agenda.

The project tasks and TODO entries are managed in the top-level xdp-project.org file and in .org files under directory areas/, which in turn links to other .org files with notes etc in the different sub-directories.

Interaction with Github issues and pull requests

There are several people working on this project, who are comfortable with different workflows. We encourage the use of the org-mode project management style described above, and to keep notes and work-in-progress stuff in the repository. However, the Github management features are also valuable, especially for the things that require direct coordination. As such, we encourage the following guidelines for using Github issues and pull requests in this repository:

Issues:

• Open issues for tasks that
  • require discussion between several people
  • you wish to assign to others
• Keep issues small and concrete

Pull requests:

• Open pull requests when:
  • You want explicit feedback on something
  • You are changing things in parts of the repository that are primarily edited by someone else (to prevent stomping on other’s work).
• But feel free to commit work-in-progress notes or text directly to master

Other worthwhile Emacs tricks

To support using git and Github in Emacs use the magit package with the forge extension. Magit is a full-featured interface for git itself, and Forge adds interaction with Github issues and pull requests directly to the Magit interface. There’s also the magit-stgit package to add support for the ‘stacked git’ package which can be useful for managing upstream kernel patch series.

If using helm for Emacs, the helm-org-rifle package allows quick searching in all open org files.