Tips for new Committers
Here are some tips for new LanguageTool committers:
- Subscribe to the
forum
to stay up-to-date, or follow the forum
feed.
- In your very first commit, add this text
to the commit message.
- Be aware that every change to the code and the rules that don’t break
the unit tests will automatically go live on
languagetool.org each day at about 21:15
CET. As we have more than one server, changes are deployed only to a
fraction of the servers for about 1 hour. During this time, you might
get inconsistent results.
- You might want to watch the LanguageTool projects at github (some
issues are discussed in the bug tracker and not on our forum)
- Your commits should not break anything:
- Get the latest updates from master via
git pull -r (rebase). This
will prevent the ugly merge commits you get when you just do git
pull.
- If you have issues with git, ask for help on our forum. Never use
git’s
--force option.
- For Java changes, consider the style guide.
- Before committing, always run the JUnit tests (
mvn clean test or
testrules.sh xx / testrules.bat xx if you’ve only modified the XML
rules, with xx being the language code). See Maven tips for
hints about how to speed this up.
- Before you push your changes, you will want to check them.
gitk
works fine for that.
- Committing large files (e.g. binary files) will grow the git history,
and they can basically never be removed. So if you think you need to
commit large files, discuss this on the forum first.
- If you write a new piece of Java code, add a JUnit test.
- If you make non-trivial changes, document them in
languagetool-standalone/CHANGES.md.
- User interface translations are done using webtranslateit,
so please don’t modify the translated MessageBundle files directly in git.
- If your commit only affects one language, start your commit message
with
[xx], where xx is the language code (like en for English)
- If your code involves a major change to some core functionality
(changing XML markup of the rules, adding a new feature, changing
important APIs), ask on the forum before you work on it.
- Be aware of our Roadmap and the feature freezes.