5. XEmacs Development

Here is some specific information on how to setup Patcher for XEmacs developers. This assumes you're a committer to the mercurial repository of the 21.5 branch.

The way I do it, I have a directory named /usr/local/src/xemacs-21.5 which is a clone of the Debian Mercurial repository. Let's call it the local trunk. I have set the proper default and default-push options in /usr/local/src/xemacs-21.5/.hg/hgrc so that I can push, pull, fetch or whatever without any argument on the command line. I also have set the username option to my XEmacs identity (that's mainly for the commit log messages).

When I work on a new feature, I do it in a directory named /usr/local/src/xemacs-21.5-new-feature, in which I commit regularly and occasionally merge with the main repository to keep up to date. When I'm satisfied with the feature, it's time to integrate it, but I don't want to import my whole personal history; so I just apply the final diff to my local trunk (which must be up to date), commit locally with Patcher and then pull it up by hand.

Under those conditions, the Patcher setup is quite simple:

• Use the mercurial or mercurial-ws built-in theme.
• Use the fake mail method, because messages are now sent to xemacs-patches automatically.
• Put subject in the :log-message-items project options. This will serve as the summary line, and then you can put whatever longer description you want on the lines below it.

That's it. Patcher generates the ChangeLog entries and performs the local commit. I just finish by pulling by hand. Maybe Patcher could also do that for me one day...

This document was generated by XEmacs shared group account on December, 19 2009 using texi2html 1.65.