Guide to Common Practices

Project rules are described in Principles of Project Operation. Questions may still arise on how to apply these rules in practice. We'll update these notes as the project matures and we figure out what works well and what doesn't.

Notes on common life cycle 'events':

Submission

Send an email to the gearbox-devel mailing list describing the code you would like to submit. The more information the better but keep in mind that only 3 criteria will be used to make the acceptance decision at this point. The code must be

relevant to robotics (therefore you should describe what the code is supposed to do)
choose an open-source license
state the copyright owner

Other information you may want to include:

A brief history of the code. E.g. was it written for a particular project? has it been used much?
Implementation overview. E.g. programming language, OS requirements, main dependencies.
Possible hardware requirements.

Common Scenarios

I'd like to submit a mapping algorithm which depends on ACE, Boost, Qt, Xerces, and all of Gnome
- accept for review.

I'd like to submit a laser driver which is implemented as 167 files in 23 directories
- accept for review as a single directory with 23 subdirectories.

I'd like to submit a tracing library which could be useful in robotics
- reject because not specific to robotics and other similar ones exist.

I'd like to submit a sonar driver with a tracing library and a serial library which the driver uses
- accept for review as a single directory with 2 subdirectories on the grounds that the general usefulness of the utility libs by themselves is not obvious.

I'd like to submit a Pioneer driver which uses the same serial library as my earlier sonar driver
- accept for review, if accepted promote the serial library to the top level of 'src' (reward multiple submissions).

I'd like to submit yet another SICK laser driver which uses the tracing library supplied with the sonar driver above
- accept for review, if accepted work with the sonar driver developer in promoting the tracing library to the top level of 'src'.

I'd like to submit a patch which swaps ACE threads for boost threads in the sonar driver above
- as with all other patches, defer the decision to the copyright holder, i.e. the original developer.

I'd like to submit an ACE-threaded behavior-based architecture
- Borderline submission due to potentially overly-broad scope and framework aspects. Discuss on the mailing list regarding the scope of the library and query the submitter for more information on their intentions for the library before choosing to accept for submission or reject.

Review and Acceptance

TBD

Maintanence

TBD

Retirement

TBD