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Contributing to Ark

Coding Style

Ark follows the kdelibs/Qt coding style. For more information about them, please see:

Sending patches

To send patches for Ark, please use KDE's Gitlab instance at https://invent.kde.org/utilities/ark.

If you already have a KDE commit account, it is still preferable to contact the maintainer instead of committing directly, at least to be a good citizen and especially to avoid git mistakes (see the Using git section).

Using git

The development model adopted by Ark is simple and rely on git's easy merging and branching capabilities. If in doubt, do not hesitate to ask!

First of all, you should do your work in a separate branch, and each commit should be as atomic as possible. This way, if you are asked to make changes to them, the rest of your work is not disturbed, and you can easily rebase.

New features are committed to the master branch, respecting KDE's Release Schedule policies. This means the soft and hard freeze periods must be respected, as well as the string freeze policy.

Bug fixes are committed to the latest stable branch (for example, release/19.12), which is then merged into the master branch. Do NOT cherry-pick commits into multiple branches! It makes following history unnecessarily harder for no reason.

How to merge stable in master

To merge the stable branch into master, the following steps can be followed:

$ git checkout release/19.12 # Whatever the stable branch is
$ # hack, hack, hack
$ # commit
$ git checkout master
$ git merge --log --edit -s recursive -Xours release/19.12

Do not worry if unrelated commits (such as translation ones made by KDE's translation infrastructure) are also merged: translation commits are automatically reverted when needed, and other commits being merged should be bug fixes by definition.

The merge command above will try to automatically resolve conflicts by preferring the version of master. This is usually good, for example a conflict often happens on the RELEASE_SERVICE_VERSION_XXX variables in the root CMakeLists.txt file. On the stable branch you will find something like:

    set (RELEASE_SERVICE_VERSION_MAJOR "16")
    set (RELEASE_SERVICE_VERSION_MINOR "04")
    set (RELEASE_SERVICE_VERSION_MICRO "02")

while on master you will find something like:

    set (RELEASE_SERVICE_VERSION_MAJOR "16")
    set (RELEASE_SERVICE_VERSION_MINOR "07")
    set (RELEASE_SERVICE_VERSION_MICRO "70")

In this example, the ours strategy option will pick the master version, which is what we want. However, when a more complex conflict happens, the ours option might fail to autoresolve the conflict and might leave the working tree in a weird state. You should always check what the merge actually did by using (after the merge):

$ git diff origin/HEAD HEAD

If the diff output is not what you expect, you can reset the merge with:

$ git reset --hard origin/HEAD

Then you can do a simple merge which will not resolve conflicts:

$ git merge release/19.12

and finally resolve all conflicts by hand.

Pushing your changes

When you are ready to push your commits to the remote repository, you may need to update your local branch first. Do NOT create unnecessary merge commits with git pull, as these commits are completely avoidable and make following history harder. Instead, you should rebase first (git pull --rebase).

See also

Instructions in the KDE community wiki: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Utils/Ark