How to generate patches

We use git as our version control system. To streamline the process of giving proper credit to the contributors when committing patches, we encourage contributors to submit patches generated using git format-patch. This has many benefits:

• Committers can't forget to attribute proper credit to the contributor
• The contributors name and email address shows up in git log
• When viewing Bigtop's source code on github.com/apache/bigtop, the commits from the contributor are linked to their github.com account if it's linked to the same email address they used when generating the git format-patch

Long story short, it makes both the contributors' and committers' lives easier, so please generate your patches using git format-patch.

Here are some instructions on how to generate patches:
1. Ensure that you have all of your change as 1 commit which has the correct commit message - something like BIGTOP-1031: README has outdated/ambiguous information
2. Then run a command like: git format-patch HEAD^..HEAD --stdout > BIGTOP-1031.patch
3. Upload the BIGTOP-1031.1.patch file to this JIRA

The naming of the patch file is up to you. The preferred way however is to just name the file after the JIRA ticket e.g. BIGTOP-1031.patch. In the latter case, If case you need to upload another version  of the patch, you should keep the file name the same and JIRA will sort them according to date/time if multiple files have the same name. This feature is also useful to traceback the history of a patch and roll-back to an earlier version if needed.

For Committers How to submit patches

While git am is typically used for applying patches generated using git format-patch, we recommend that committers use the --signoff flag when using git am. This way the commit, even though is attributed to the contributor, it shows the committer's name in the log message as "Signed-off-by: <Committer name>" which can be useful.
Consequently, to commit a patch, do the following:

git am --signoff < BIGTOP-1031.patch

REVIEWING PATCHES (commiter guidelines)

Contributors and Commiters  Go over this checklist for your patches

(Hopefuly more of this will be automated by https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BIGTOP-1249 )

• Commit message should be part of the patch, see the recipe above using "git format-patch" for a way to do that.
• Commit message should be 1 line long.  If you have multiple commits , squash them and rename them as in the next bullet:
• Commit message should be of the format "JIRA:message", for example "BIGTOP-1234: A patch that makes bigtop awesome".
• Follow apache hadoop formatting guidelines - 
  • No trailing whitespace on lines
  • Code must be formatted according to Sun's conventions, with one exception: 
  • Indent two spaces per level, not four.
• Commits which modify the way we RUN bigtop should modify corresponding README files as well.
• CODE vs Docs
  • Commits should be +1's by one external reviewer before commiting.
  • DOCs commits (README files, README.md files, and .txt files) can be commited by simply stating in the JIRA ("DOC")