Welcome to git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git project is managed, and how you can work with it.

Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to the list address . You don't have to be subscribed to send messages. The convention on the list is to keep everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to ask "Please Cc: me, I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting, but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise. Please do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case. Messages getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/ http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found on the #git IRC channel on Freenode. Its log is available at:

http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop your bug report with just "git does not work". "I tried to do X but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I tried to do X and git did Y, which is broken". It often is that what you expect is not what other people expect, and chances are that what you expect is very different from what people who have worked on git have expected (otherwise, the behavior would have been changed to match that expectation long time ago).

Please remember to always state

• what you wanted to do;

• what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce

  the behavior);

• what you saw happen;

• what you expected to see; and

• how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further hints.