Contributing Code

Our main project, MVHub, is free software. Please use, modify and improve our code.

We use Bazaar as our version control system and manage our code with Launchpad.net. Launchpad is a free service and you can register for an account here.

Debian (Lenny and newer) or Ubuntu (Hardy and newer) Linux are the assumed operating systems within the MVHub install instructions. Other flavors of Unix/Linux should work, but are untested. As for Windows, some of our best friends use it. We haven't deliberately broken our software for Microsoft, but we'd be surprised if MVHub ran on Windows without a lot of work.

Installing Our Software

Install Bazaar on your system to download the latest development branch of our source code.

    sudo aptitude install bazaar

Create the directory where the MVHub source code is to be downloaded. $USER is your username and should already be set as an environment variable.
NOTICE: You MUST use this directory structure.

    mkdir -p /var/www/mvhub/$USER/source-code/
    cd /var/www/mvhub/$USER/source-code/

Then, perform the bzr branch command to download a working copy of our code to the source-code directory within the subfolder mvhub-01.

    bzr branch lp:mvhub mvhub-01

Read the documentation included within the app-mvhub/doc/checklists directory for further instructions on installing and configuring the MVHub web application.

    cd mvhub-01
    more app-mvhub/doc/checklists/install_mvhub.txt

Hack away (write or fix some code)

Submitting Your Code

There are two ways you can submit your code to be integrated back within the main developement branch:

Using the Launchpad interface
By email

Using Launchpad

Before preceding, ensure you have:

Created an account in Launchpad
Setup an ssh key to allow you to push code onto Launchpad

Ensure Bazaar knows your Launchpad username and push your branch onto Launchpad.

    bzr launchpad-login $LAUNCHPAD_USERNAME
    bzr push lp:~$LAUNCHPAD_USERNAME/mvhub/mvhub-01

Perform a merge request of your branch with the MVHub trunk branch on the mvhub-01 branch page.

    https://code.launchpad.net/$LAUNCHPAD_USERNAME/mvhub/mvhub-01/+register-merge

By Email

You can email a patch of your changes to our development team if you don't want to create a Launchpad account. First, make a patch file:

    bzr send -o mvhub-01.patch

Then email the mvhub-01.patch file to Joe@thecsl.org. Please include a helpful cover note explaining the changes you have made.