submitting-a-pull-request.rst (3742B)
1 .. _submitting-a-pull-request: 2 3 Submitting a Pull Request 4 ========================= 5 6 QEMU welcomes contributions of code, but we generally expect these to be 7 sent as simple patch emails to the mailing list (see our page on 8 :ref:`submitting-a-patch` 9 for more details). Generally only existing submaintainers of a tree 10 will need to submit pull requests, although occasionally for a large 11 patch series we might ask a submitter to send a pull request. This page 12 documents our recommendations on pull requests for those people. 13 14 A good rule of thumb is not to send a pull request unless somebody asks 15 you to. 16 17 **Resend the patches with the pull request** as emails which are 18 threaded as follow-ups to the pull request itself. The simplest way to 19 do this is to use ``git format-patch --cover-letter`` to create the 20 emails, and then edit the cover letter to include the pull request 21 details that ``git request-pull`` outputs. 22 23 **Use PULL as the subject line tag** in both the cover letter and the 24 retransmitted patch mails (for example, by using 25 ``--subject-prefix=PULL`` in your ``git format-patch`` command). This 26 helps people to filter in or out the resulting emails (especially useful 27 if they are only CC'd on one email out of the set). 28 29 **Each patch must have your own Signed-off-by: line** as well as that of 30 the original author if the patch was not written by you. This is because 31 with a pull request you're now indicating that the patch has passed via 32 you rather than directly from the original author. 33 34 **Don't forget to add Reviewed-by: and Acked-by: lines**. When other 35 people have reviewed the patches you're putting in the pull request, 36 make sure you've copied their signoffs across. (If you use the `patches 37 tool <https://github.com/stefanha/patches>`__ to add patches from email 38 directly to your git repo it will include the tags automatically; if 39 you're updating patches manually or in some other way you'll need to 40 edit the commit messages by hand.) 41 42 **Don't send pull requests for code that hasn't passed review**. A pull 43 request says these patches are ready to go into QEMU now, so they must 44 have passed the standard code review processes. In particular if you've 45 corrected issues in one round of code review, you need to send your 46 fixed patch series as normal to the list; you can't put it in a pull 47 request until it's gone through. (Extremely trivial fixes may be OK to 48 just fix in passing, but if in doubt err on the side of not.) 49 50 **Test before sending**. This is an obvious thing to say, but make sure 51 everything builds (including that it compiles at each step of the patch 52 series) and that "make check" passes before sending out the pull 53 request. As a submaintainer you're one of QEMU's lines of defense 54 against bad code, so double check the details. 55 56 **All pull requests must be signed**. By "signed" here we mean that 57 the pullreq email should quote a tag which is a GPG-signed tag (as 58 created with 'gpg tag -s ...'). See :ref:`maintainer_keys` for 59 details. 60 61 **Pull requests not for master should say "not for master" and have 62 "PULL SUBSYSTEM whatever" in the subject tag**. If your pull request is 63 targeting a stable branch or some submaintainer tree, please include the 64 string "not for master" in the cover letter email, and make sure the 65 subject tag is "PULL SUBSYSTEM s390/block/whatever" rather than just 66 "PULL". This allows it to be automatically filtered out of the set of 67 pull requests that should be applied to master. 68 69 You might be interested in the `make-pullreq 70 <https://git.linaro.org/people/peter.maydell/misc-scripts.git/tree/make-pullreq>`__ 71 script which automates some of this process for you and includes a few 72 sanity checks. Note that you must edit it to configure it suitably for 73 your local situation!