Documentation/Nightly/Developers/ProjectForks

Overview

While Slicer specific patches related to dependent project (i.e. VTK) are integrated upstream, it is not uncommon to build Slicer against a Slicer specific fork of the project.

For example: https://github.com/Slicer/VTK

Naming convention for Slicer fork branches

Patches for tagged release

For each version of the project requiring some specific patches, a branch following that convention will be created: slicer-vX.Y.Z-YEAR-MONTH-DAY where

• X.Y.Z corresponds to the version of the fork project
• YEAR-MONTH-DAY corresponds to the date of the last official commit of the fork project.

For example, in case of the Slicer/VTK fork, the branch slicer-v6.2.0-2015-03-02 has been created.

Patches for development branch

In this case, since there is no tag associated with the branch, the Slicer specific patch should be added to a branch named using the date of the commit parent of the Slicer branch: slicer-vX.Y-YEAR-MONTH-DAY-REV where

• X.Y corresponds to the fork release
• REV corresponds to either the first 7 chars of git hash or SVN revision (for example r1234)
• YEAR-MONTH-DAY corresponds to the date of the last official commit of the fork project

For example: slicer-v6.2.0-2015-02-24-70bad0e

Adding patches to the fork

When adding new patches to the fork, prefer direct commits or cherry-picked commits over merge commits. Avoiding merge commits makes it easier to rebase the fork against a new upstream revision.

Commit message

Title and Content

The following command should be used to list changes:

git shortlog sha_before..sha_after --no-merges

where sha_before and sha_after are the first seven charachers of the SHA.

Here is an example of commit updating External_VTKv6.cmake in Slicer:

ENH: Update VTK to handle default values for array parameters in python
    
Without this commit, one must specify parameters like (,int array[3]=0) when
the method is called from python.

$ git shortlog 1c30cb0..4b9957b --no-merges
David Gobbi (2):
      Fix wrapping pointer parameters with default value 0.
      Handle default values for array parameters in python.

Source: r25160

Caveats

• For the commit title, prefer something like ENH: Update VTK to ... instead of ENH: Update VTK git tag to ...

• If there is only one commit in the update, it is reasonable to copy the message. For example, see r24693.

• If the copied message reference the sha1 of its project (e.g VTK), change it to this form org/proj@sha. For example, see r24693.

• If there is a long list of changes return by git shortlog, make sure to copy the full list. Before the list, consider also adding a short summary of the "interesting" changes. For example, see r25068