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Org maintainer tasks

This document describes the tasks the Org-mode maintainer has to do and how they are performed.

Git workflow

The git repository has two branches:

master
for current development.
maint
for bug fixes against latest major or minor release.

Bug fixes always go on maint then are merged on master.

New features always go on master.

Releasing

Major release

The release number for main releases look like this: 7.13

Main releases are made whenever Org is in a state where the feature set is consistent and we feel that the features that are implemented is something we want to support in the future.

A major release turns the current state of the master branch into a release.

When doing a major release, make sure all changes from the maint branch are merged into the the master branch, then merge the master branch back into maint to synchronize the two.

Minor release

The release number for minor releases look like this: 7.13.1

Minor releases are small amends to main releases. Usually they fix critical bugs discovered in a main release. Minor bugs are usually not fixed – they will be adressed in the next main release.

Only the fix to the bug is bundled into a release, without the main development work going on in the master branch. Since the bug fix will also be needed in the master branch, usually the fix is made in maint then merged in master.

Tagging the release

When doing a major and a minor release, after all necessary merging is done, tag the maint branch for the release with:

git tag -a release_7.9.1 -m “Adding release tag”

and push tags with

git push –tags

We also encourage you to sign release tags like this:

git tag -s release_7.9.1 -m “Adding release tag”

Uploading the release files from the orgmode.org server

Log on the orgmode.org server as the emacs user and cd to ~/git/org-mode

From there do

make release make upload

to create the .tar.gz and .zip files, the documentation, and to upload everything at the right place.

Synchonization with Emacs

This is still a significant headache. Some hand work is needed here.

Emacs uses bzr. A useful introduction to bzr for Emacs developers can be found here. While I see all the advantages this would have, I cannot bring myself to switch away from git for my day-to-day work, because I know git so well, and because git seems to me as being much more powerful, conceptionally simple (once you have bent your head around it), and so much faster.

So the way I have been doing things with Emacs is this:

  1. I do not update the version in Emacs too often. Just once every few months - this is frequently enough for the Emacs release cycle. Care must be taken to get in a new and stable version shortly before Emacs goes into feature freeze and pretest, because that version is going to be in the wild for a long time.
  2. I watch the Emacs diffs for changes made by the maintainers of Emacs in the org-mode files in Emacs. Any changes that come up there, I merge into the development version of Org-mode. Occasionally I do not do this, if I do not agree with a change. The changes go into Org without a ChangeLog-like entry in the commit message. The reason for this is that we will later generate a ChangeLog file from our commit messages, and I do not want double ChangeLog entries in the Emacs ChangeLog file.
  3. When I have made a release (usually I wait for the minor releases to stabilize), I copy org files into the Emacs repository. Yes, I do not merge, I copy. This has been the source of some problems in the past - Emacs developers are not happy when I accidentally overwrite changes they made. But I have not had the patience to work out a better mechanism, and I really dislike the idea that the version in Emacs starts diverging from my own.

    Careful: Copy org.texi and orgcard.tex into the right places, and also copy the lisp files with two exceptions: Do not copy org-colview-xemacs.el and org-loaddefs.el. The former does not belong in Emacs. And the latter would actually be harmful because Emacs generates its own autoloads.

  4. Generate the ChangeLog entries

    For this, I do in the org-mode git repository

    mk/make_emacs_changelog release_7.02.05..release_7.03.02

    This will spit out ChangeLog entries (for the given commit range) that need to go into the ChangeLog files in Emacs. Org-mode contributes to 3 different ChangeLog files in Emacs:

    lisp/org/ChangeLog    (for lisp changes)
doc/misc/ChangeLog    (for org.texi changes)
etc/ChangeLog         (for refcard changes)

    When you run the make_emacs_changelog program, you will be prompted for a date in ISO format YYYY-MM-DD, this date will be used in the ChangeLog entries - Emacs developers want these dates to be the time when the change has been installed into Emacs, not the time when we made the change in our own repository. So all the ChangeLog entries will get the same date. You will also be prompted for the kind of ChangeLog you want to make, possible answers are lisp, texi, and card. The program will then select the correct entries for the specified ChangeLog file. If you don’t like being prompted, you can give the date and type as second and third command line arguments to make_emacs_changelog, for example

    mk/make_emacs_changelog release_7.02.05..release_7.03.02 2010-12-11 lisp

    These entries need to be added to the ChangeLog files in Emacs. You should, in the ChangeLog file, select the inserted region of new entries and do M-x fill-region, so that the entries are formatted correctly. I then do look through the entries quickly to make sure they are formatted properly, that the email addresses look right etc.

  5. Commit the changes into the bzr repository and you are done. Emacs developers often look throught the commit and make minor changes - these need to be merged back into our own repo.

Updating the list of hooks/commands/options on Worg

Load the mk/eldo.el file then M-x eldo-make-doc RET.

This will produce an org file with the documentation.

Import this file into worg/doc.org, leaving the header untouched (except for the release number).

Then commit and push the change on the worg.git repository.

Copyright assignments

The maintainer needs to keep track of copyright assignments. Even better, find a volunteer to do this.

The assignment form is included in the repository as a file that you can send to contributors: request-assign-future.txt

The list of all contributors from who we have the papers is kept on Worg at http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contribute.html, so that committers can check if a patch can go into the core.

The assignment process does not allways go smoothly, and it has happened several times that it gets stuck or forgotten at the FSF. The contact at the FSF for this is: mailto:copyright-clerk@fsf.org

Emails from the paper submitter have been ignored in the past, but an email from me (Carsten) as the maintainer of Org mode has usually fixed such cases within a few days.