libvirt/docs/committer-guidelines.rst

====================
Committer guidelines
====================

The AUTHORS files indicates the list of people with commit access
right who can actually merge the patches.

The general rule for committing a patch is to make sure it has
been reviewed properly in the mailing-list first, usually if a
couple of people gave an ACK or +1 to a patch and nobody raised an
objection on the list it should be good to go. If the patch
touches a part of the code where you're not the main maintainer,
or where you do not have a very clear idea of how things work,
it's better to wait for a more authoritative feedback though.
Before committing, please also rebuild locally, run 'make check
syntax-check', and make sure you don't raise errors.

An exception to 'review and approval on the list first' is fixing
failures to build:

-  if a recently committed patch breaks compilation on a platform
   or for a given driver, then it's fine to commit a minimal fix
   directly without getting the review feedback first
-  if make check or make syntax-check breaks, if there is an
   obvious fix, it's fine to commit immediately. The patch should
   still be sent to the list (or tell what the fix was if
   trivial), and 'make check syntax-check' should pass too, before
   committing anything
-  fixes for documentation and code comments can be managed in the
   same way, but still make sure they get reviewed if non-trivial.
-  (ir)regular pulls from other repositories or automated updates,
   such as the keycodemap submodule updates, pulling in new
   translations or updating the container images for the CI system