General guidelines for using Drupal's CVS contrib repository

Here are some guidelines and hints on using Drupal's contrib repository:

• See the attached PDF How to Effectively Manage and Release Your Drupal Contributions for a more detailed tutorial on using branches and tags to maintain your project.
• Upon committing a new module or theme, add a concise description of what the module does or how this theme is unique (e.g. fluid/fixed, tables/css, ...etc.)
• Do not create a .tar.gz or .zip archive and commit it to the repository. CVS is designed to handle changes and revisions to individual files, and committing an archive defeats its very purpose.
• Try to group your commits functionally. For example a change that affects several files has to be committed in a single commit. This allows others to know what has changed, roll it back if necessary, create patches, ...etc. Do not commit unrelated changes together in one commit, and do not commit the change to each file separately.
• Do not commit every file separately when initially committing a module. Do a cvs add on all the files that need to go in, then do a cvs commit to check them into the repository.
• If you are using a GUI client, check its default settings. For example Eclipse uses -kk which affects the CVS Id tag. Change that to -kkv.
• Make sure that you always have a commit description for every commit you do. Provide history and give credit in your commit comments. Note that this info gets published at http://drupal.org/cvs.
• If you are referencing another module or a 3rd party site in your description, it is best if you provide a proper link to it, not just a bare URL, or worse, just the name.
• It is a good idea to keep up with new releases of Drupal and update your modules/themes for the new release as betas are available. However, do not tag your module/theme with the new tag until you have converted the HEAD version to the new release