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SubmittingRFCs

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yosefe edited this page Oct 21, 2014 · 3 revisions

In the Open MPI project, we track three main things:

  1. Bugs and enhancement requests: These tracked in the Github Issues tracker in the ompi repository.
  2. Requests to get code into the release branches: These are tracked in the Pull Requests in the ompi-release repository.
  3. RFCs (i.e., "hey, I've got an idea -- what do people think about this?"): These are typically tracked in the Pull Requests in the ompi repository.

You must have a Github account to submit bugs or pull requests.

Submitting an RFC

A "Request for Comment" is typically sent to the Open MPI developer community when one developer has an idea for which they would like some feedback. This is typically done for large new features, or features that change core functionality.

Github provides a nice code review functionality for exactly this purpose: Pull Requests (we also use Github Pull Requests to get code to Open MPI release branches).

In this case, the developer will file a Pull Requests to the master branch on the ompi repo (as opposed to a release branch in the ompi-release repo).

In addition to filing a Pull Request, the developer still needs to send something to the open-mpi development list.

As such, the process for an RFC is quite similar to that of a Pull Request to a release branch:

  1. Developer sends RFC to the mailing list.
  2. Developer creates a topic branch off their master branch in their local ompi clone.
  3. Developer writes/commits code in this topic branch.
  4. Developer pushes their topic branch to their personal Github repo (NOT the main ompi repo!).
  5. Developer files a Pull Request to bring the code to the relevant branch in the ompi repo.

Once the Pull Request is filed, there can be discussion on the PR, and the developer may revise their patch (or series of patches) on the topic branch, and re-push to their personal Github repo to allow others to see the changes. If the community agrees, the PR can be merged into master on the main ompi repo, and then closed. The topic branch at Github and in the developer's local repo can be deleted.

This wiki page shows an example filing of a Pull Request to the ompi-release repo. Filing an RFC Pull Request is the same concept, but a bit simpler.

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