4 Conventions and Traditions

As a new committer there are a number of things you should do first.

• Add yourself to the ``Developers'' section of the Contributors List and remove yourself from the ``Additional Contributors'' section.

  This is a relatively easy task, but remains a good first test of your CVS skills.

• Add an entry for yourself to www/en/news/news.xml. Look for the other entries that look like ``A new committer'' and follow the format.

• If you have a PGP or GnuPG key, you may want to add it to doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/pgpkeys.

  Dag-Erling C. Smørgrav <des@FreeBSD.org> has written a shell script to make this extremely simple. See the README file for more information.

• Some people add an entry for themselves to ports/astro/xearth/files/freebsd.committers.markers.

• Some people add an entry for themselves to src/usr.bin/calendar/calendars/calendar.freebsd.

• Introduce yourself to the other committers, otherwise no one will have any idea who you are or what you are working on. You do not have to write a comprehensive biography, just write a paragraph or two about who you are and what you plan to be working on as a committer in FreeBSD. Email this to the FreeBSD developers mailing list <freebsd-developers@FreeBSD.org> and you will be on your way!

• Log into hub.FreeBSD.org and create a /var/forward/user (where user is your username) file containing the e-mail address where you want mail addressed to yourusername@FreeBSD.org to be forwarded. This includes all of the commit messages as well as any other mail addressed to the FreeBSD committer's mailing list <cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org> and the FreeBSD developers mailing list <freebsd-developers@FreeBSD.org>. Really large mailboxes which have taken up permanent residence on hub often get ``accidentally'' truncated without warning, so forward it or read it and you will not lose it.

• If you are subscribed to the FreeBSD CVS commit message mailing list <cvs-all@FreeBSD.org>, you will probably want to unsubscribe to avoid receiving duplicate copies of commit messages and their followups.

All new committers also have a mentor assigned to them for the first few months. Your mentor is more or less responsible for explaining anything which is confusing to you and is also responsible for your actions during this initial period. If you make a bogus commit, it is only going to embarrass your mentor and you should probably make it a policy to pass at least your first few commits by your mentor before committing it to the repository.

All commits should go to FreeBSD-CURRENT first before being merged to FreeBSD-STABLE. No major new features or high-risk modifications should be made to the FreeBSD-STABLE branch.