IRRToolSet Development Policies

These policies are proposals only, and have not been discussed or agreed on by the IRRToolSet community! -Shane

Releases

Historically the IRRToolSet used major.minor.patchlevel numbering. It has become the fashion to move away from arbitrary numbers for releases, and use dates. This allows users to know instantly when a release was made, and avoids unhelpful debates about whether a change is "major" or "minor".

So when the developers of the IRRToolSet feel there are enough changes in the trunk to justify a release, one will be made, named after the date of the release.

Code Review and Merging

The IRRToolSet is not very polished code, so almost every change is an improvement. Because of this, we are liberal in changes that we accept. Each patch should be reviewed by someone who is not the author. Once that is done, either the reviewer or the author can check it into the trunk.

autoconf/automake

Currently, the autoconf macros are from 2.13. Should we consider moving to a more recent version of autoconf? Should we make our use of 2.13 the rule?

C++ Compiler

IRRToolSet does not compile on GCC4. The code needs to be updated to support GCC4-style C++.

Removal of Cruft

There are several items in IRRToolSet which are no longer used, listed in OldTools. These tools should be either updated so that they work correctly, or else dropped from the distribution.

Documentation / Working Examples

The documentation for IRRToolSet is extremely limited, outdated and severely lacking in useful examples. It needs significant work to bring it up to date and to ensure that there are adequate examples to illustrate its flexibility.

Configuration Tolerance / User Friendliness

IRRToolSet is notoriously intolerant of minor syntactical issues, making it extremely difficult to work with in practice. It needs a work to make it more usable and tolerant of perceived syntax problems.