Contributed Software

Although these pieces are available as part of the official git

source tree, they are in somewhat different status. The

intention is to keep interesting tools around git here, maybe

even experimental ones, to give users an easier access to them,

and to give tools wider exposure, so that they can be improved

faster.

I am not expecting to touch these myself that much. As far as

my day-to-day operation is concerned, these subdirectories are

owned by their respective primary authors. I am willing to help

if users of these components and the contrib/ subtree "owners"

have technical/design issues to resolve, but the initiative to

fix and/or enhance things _must_ be on the side of the subtree

owners. IOW, I won't be actively looking for bugs and rooms for

enhancements in them as the git maintainer -- I may only do so

just as one of the users when I want to scratch my own itch. If

you have patches to things in contrib/ area, the patch should be

first sent to the primary author, and then the primary author

should ack and forward it to me (git pull request is nicer).

This is the same way as how I have been treating gitk, and to a

lesser degree various foreign SCM interfaces, so you know the

drill.

I expect that things that start their life in the contrib/ area

to graduate out of contrib/ once they mature, either by becoming

projects on their own, or moving to the toplevel directory. On

the other hand, I expect I'll be proposing removal of disused

and inactive ones from time to time.

If you have new things to add to this area, please first propose

it on the git mailing list, and after a list discussion proves

there are some general interests (it does not have to be a

list-wide consensus for a tool targeted to a relatively narrow

audience -- for example I do not work with projects whose

upstream is svn, so I have no use for git-svn myself, but it is

of general interest for people who need to interoperate with SVN

repositories in a way git-svn works better than git-svnimport),

submit a patch to create a subdirectory of contrib/ and put your

stuff there.

-jc