[aspect-devel] Updates relevant to contributors

[Rene Gassmoeller]

Hi all,

this is a development update that is mostly of concern to people 
actively extending ASPECT and creating pull requests on Github.

As you know we collect all significant contributions to ASPECT within a 
release cycle in a file called doc/modules/changes.h, in order to be 
able to give proper credit to the authors of the extensions in the 
release announcements and on the ASPECT website. These files are 
archived for all releases within the project. Unfortunately, the 
structure of the file often leads to conflicts when merging several 
parallel development branches that all contained relevant additions.

We are happy to announce that this system was replaced by a more 
scalable and (hopefully) simpler to use approach that should save all 
developers some time. The new procedure is described in detail in the 
file doc/modules/README.md. To summarize: Whenever you prepare a pull 
request of significance, you should now create a new text file in the 
folder doc/modules/changes/ with a filename that follows the structure 
YYYYMMDD_your_name, which contains an entry similar to the entries in 
our previous changes.h file. You can take a look in the folder for 
examples. The full file changes.h is now only generated whenever 
necessary (e.g. for a release) by a script that resides in doc/modules/. 
This way parallel developments no longer modify the same file, and many 
conflicts will be avoided.

While this change will require all existing pull requests to be rebased 
and modified one (last) time, we think that this change will be 
particularly handy during the upcoming hackathon, when we will have ~20 
people working on projects in parallel.

Let us know if something about this approach does not work for you!

Best regards,

Rene


-- 
Rene Gassmoeller
http://www.math.colostate.edu/~gassmoel/