VTK/Commit Guidelines

• Follow the VTK Coding Standards when writing new code or modifying existing code

• Do not commit 3rd party code that is compiled and linked in by default unless it conforms to VTK's BSD-style license. For example GPL and LGPL do not conform to a BSD license.

• Build into a fresh empty binary directory after making your last code change

• Run ctest in your binary directory and make sure all the VTK tests pass before committing your code

• If possible, move your changes to another platform or compiler and verify that they work there also

• If possible, use an older compiler to verify that you are not relying on newer features or C++ constructs only handled by newer versions of compilers or platform libraries. Visual Studio 6 and gcc 2.95 are still supported platforms for VTK. Your code must build and test cleanly on these platforms to pass all the nightly dashboards.

• For large commit (eg. update of tiff library, addition of a brand new library, refactoring of numerous classes in VTK), it is usally a good idea to send an email to the vtk-developers mailing list.

• Commit your changes as early in the day as possible, preferably before 12:00 noon Eastern time. If it's after that time, strongly consider waiting until first thing next morning. There should not be a rush when committing code to VTK. It's better to commit changes early so that you have time to respond to continuous dashboard failures before the slew of nightly dashboards runs.

• Do NOT commit code after 12:00 noon Eastern time unless it is to address a continuous dashboard failure introduced by a commit that you did before 12:00 noon Eastern time.

• Commit the entire tree in one call to cvs commit. Do not call commit on some files in one directory and then others in another directory. The continuous dashboards might pick up one set of changes and report failures because the second set of changes is necessary to avoid the failures (configure, build or test issues...). You can avoid this by always doing a top level commit of everything related to the checkin all at once.

• Observe the continuous dashboards for the remainder of the day after your commit

• Observe the nightly dashboards the day following your commit

• Fix any warnings, errors or test failures related to your commit as soon as possible after becoming aware of them. If they are too difficult to fix quickly or you don't have time to restore the dashboards to green, then back out your changes until you do have time. If you don't, somebody else will do it for you... :-)

More tips to avoid failures

• Make sure you run all the tests before you commit (At a command prompt in your build directory, type 'ctest', assuming that the cmake and ctest executable directories are in your path).

• Turn Tcl wrapping on. About half of the tests in VTK are in Tcl. Note that if you are building ParaView, the Tcl wrapping is forced to off. You have to build another versions of VTK to get the Tcl wrapping.

• It might also help to build with MPI and also to set PYTHON_EXECUTABLE (some tests depend on python).

• Compile code with options like the following gcc options to catch warnings:

-Wall -W -Wunused-variable -Wunused-parameter -Wunused-function -Wunused -Woverloaded-virtual

• If you add something to VTK, add a test for it as well.

• It is good to test on 64 bit machines to draw out potential problems.

• It is also good to test vtkIdType as both 32 bit and 64 bits (toggled with the VTK_USE_64BIT_IDS CMake option.

• Make sure Tcl wrappers work for your code (in both VTK and vtkSNL) - wrap header file statements with //BTX and //ETX to tell the wrapper to ignore them.

• Mixing floats and doubles in computation is bad.

• Your classes need to have a "PrintSelf()" method that prints out your variables (check if they're NULL first), or else you will get test failures.

• Aren't allowed to define copy constructors/operators - instead create a "Copy()" method or something similar. In fact, you should always declare the "default" copy constructors and operators as private and never implement them.

• Prefix commit messages with the following when committing code to

VTK or ParaView:

ENH: Feature Implementation
BUG: Bug fix
STYLE: Coding style change (indenting, braces, non-bug or feature change)
CMP: Fixed compiler error or warning
DOC: Changed a comment

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