On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 01:57:57PM +0100, Peter Howkins wrote: > > Give us a couple of days to sort things out and I'll post some more > details for users, developers and the generally interested. > > At the moment it looks like updating the riscos.info pages and tutorials > to point at the spoon repository, downloads and documenation, and making > sure all the riscos.info content is either, replicated in spoon, up to > date, or in the case of some tutorials, with large caveats explaining > this was for an earlier version. This should remove the confusion > surrounding the two repositories (one no longer being used).
Information for users --------------------- The latest releases of RPCEmu will be available on the website http://www.marutan.net/rpcemuspoon/ I would recommend using a release version of RPCEmu, as opposed to using the source code repository (even if you're are a Linux user compiling from source), as release versions have had more testing and the documentation updated to match them. How to report bugs, suggestions and ask for advice This best place for questions and advice is this mailing list, where both fellow users and developers will be reading it. All bug reports are very welcome. RPCEmu is a large and complex piece of software, it's difficult to test all combinations of OS configuration and software. Even if you think "Surely they'd already know about this bug" report it anyway, if a bug if affecting a lot of people it helps us prioritise fixes. Similarly all suggestions are very welcome, the users help us know which sections of the software are hard to use and what needs improvement. So all suggestions to the program itself and support files or documentation are very much appreciated. As for advice, asking on this mailing list is the best thing. You'll find the users and developers both on this list. Many of whom have been using the program for a long time and can offer lots of useful suggestions and in the event of a bug maybe a workaround. Information for developers and potential developers --------------------------------------------------- We're very happy for RPCEmu to accept code and contributions from third parties, already many people have contributed code and we hope to continue down this route. The RPCEmu source is stored inside the Mercurial version control system, Mercurial clients are available for many platforms, including (but not limited too) Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, BSDs. If you are used to a different version control system, such as CVS or SVN, Mercurial (as a distributed version control system) may seem a little odd, but there are plenty of tutorials and advice for users coming from other systems on the web. The Mercurial repository is based at http://www.home.marutan.net/hg/rpcemu and checking out the code is as simple as hg clone http://www.home.marutan.net/hg/rpcemu rpcemu How to get code committed into the repository. Prepare a patch file of the differences between your new code and the current 'HEAD' of the project. Mercurial provides the 'hg diff' command, which generates diff files suitable for this. Then post this patch file to the mailing list (or too us directly if you so wish), with an explanation of what it's for, and in the case of bug fixes, the bug it's meant to fix (it's not always obvious from the code) Generally the smaller the patch, with the most specific function or reason, the easier the patch is to merge in, whereas a "I fixed everything I thought was wrong" would take a very long time to verify and test. Patches may get edited before being committed, or if the changes required are particularly large an updated patch may be requested of the developer. In some rare cases it might not be possible to commit a patch, and at that point there should be a stated reason (e.g. patch overlaps with another patch that deprecates it, patch is too widespread to verify (suggest breaking into smaller patches), etc). If you have any questions, once again the mailing list is the best place to ask, also, if you're considering a particulaly large change, that would affect a large functional area or many files, it might well be worth getting some advice from the developers on the mailing list first, incase it overlaps with other development work, or even just a suggestion of how to accomplish it in smaller changes. Other information ----------------- At the moment the mailing list traffic is very low, but if it becomes too congested or busy, a suggestion we might implement is to split the user messages (questions, bug reports etc) from the developer messages (patch requests), as whilst developers will generally wish to see user messages, users may well not wish to see code discussions. I hope this answers some questions people have had about development and reassured them that things can quite happily continue on into the future. Peter ps Now I've gone to the effort of writing that much, I think I'll put it on the website too :-) -- Peter Howkins [email protected] _______________________________________________ Rpcemu mailing list [email protected] http://www.riscos.info/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rpcemu
