cdist-hacker - How to get (stuff) into cdist

Welcome dear hacker! I invite you to a tour of pointers to get into the usable configuration mangament system, cdist.

The first thing to know is probably that cdist is brought to you by people who care about how code looks like and who think twice before merging or implementing a feature: Less features with good usability are far better than the opposite.

If you believe you’ve found a bug and verified that it is in the latest version, drop a mail to the cdist mailing list, subject prefixed with "[BUG] " or create an issue on github.

If something should be better done or needs to fixed, add the word FIXME nearby, so grepping for FIXME gives all positions that need to be fixed.

Indention is 4 spaces (welcome to the python world).

If you did some cool changes to cdist, which you value as a benefit for everybody using cdist, you’re welcome to propose inclusion into upstream.

There are though some requirements to ensure your changes don’t break others work nor kill the authors brain:

As soon as your work meets these requirements, write a mail for inclusion to the mailinglist cdist at cdist — at — l.schottelius.org or open a pull request at http://github.com/telmich/cdist.

For detailled information about types, see cdist-type(7).

Submitting a type works as described above, with the additional requirement that a corresponding manpage named man.text in asciidoc format with the manpage-name "cdist-type__NAME" is included in the type directory AND asciidoc is able to compile it (i.e. do NOT have to many "=" in the second line).

Warning: Submitting "exec" or "run" types that simply echo their parameter in gencode* will not be accepted, because they are of no use. Every type can output code and thus such a type introduces redundant functionality that is given by core cdist already.

The following workflow works fine for most developers:

# get latest upstream master branch
git clone https://github.com/telmich/cdist.git

# update if already existing
cd cdist; git fetch -v; git merge origin/master

# create a new branch for your feature/bugfix
cd cdist # if you haven't done before
git checkout -b documentation_cleanup

# *hack*
*hack*

# clone the cdist repository on github if you haven't done so

# configure your repo to know about your clone (only once)
git remote add github git@github.com:YOURUSERNAME/cdist.git

# push the new branch to github
git push github documentation_cleanup

# (or everything)
git push --mirror github

# create a pull request at github (use a browser)
# *fixthingsbecausequalityassurancefoundissuesinourpatch*
*hack*

# push code to github again
git push ... # like above

# add comment that everything should be green now (use a browser)

# go back to master branch
git checkout master

# update master branch that includes your changes now
git fetch -v origin
git diff master..origin/master
git merge origin/master

If at any point you want to go back to the original master branch, you can use git stash to stash your changes away:

# assume you are on documentation_cleanup
git stash

# change to master and update to most recent upstream version
git checkout master
git fetch -v origin
git merge origin/master

Similar when you want to develop another new feature, you go back to the master branch and create another branch based on it:

# change to master and update to most recent upstream version
git checkout master
git fetch -v origin
git merge origin/master

git checkout -b another_feature

(you can repeat the code above for as many features as you want to develop in parallel)

Copyright (C) 2011-2013 Nico Schottelius. Free use of this software is granted under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3).