Page History

This document describes how to commit changes to ZooKeeper. It assumes a knowledge of subversion. While it is for committers to use as a guide, it also provides contributors an idea of how the commit process actually works.

In general we are very conservative about changing the ZooKeeper code base. It is ground truth for systems that use it, so we need to make sure that it is reliable for this reason we use Review Then Commit (RTC)http://www.apache.org/foundation/glossary.html#ReviewThenCommit^{Image Added} change policy.

Except for some very rare cases any change to the ZooKeeper code base will start off as a Jira. (In some cases a change may relate to more than one Jira. Also, there are cases when a Jira results in multiple commits.) Generally, the process of getting ready to commit when the Jira has a patch associated with it and the contributor decides that it is ready for review and marks it patch available. Sometimes, for bigger patches, review board is used to manage the reviews (reviews.apache.org). Once it is patch available hudson will run against the patch. (First checklist item for committing: does the patch pass hudson?)

...

With the required number of approvals, a committer (any committer can do this including the one that committed the patch) can now make the change to the code base. Here are the recommended steps for committing:

...