14 Miscellaneous Questions

14.1. Why are trivial or cosmetic changes to files on a vendor branch a bad idea?
14.2. How do I add a new file to a CVS branch?
14.3. What “meta” information should I include in a commit message?
14.4. How do I access people.FreeBSD.org to put up personal or project information?
14.5. Where are the mailing list archives stored?

As well as including an informative message with each commit you may need to include some additional information as well.

This information consists of one or more lines containing the key word or phrase, a colon, tabs for formatting, and then the additional information.

The key words or phrases are:

In some cases you may need to combine some of these.

Consider the situation where a user has submitted a PR containing code from the NetBSD project. You are looking at the PR, but it is not an area of the tree you normally work in, so you have decided to get the change reviewed by the arch mailing list. Since the change is complex, you opt to MFC after one month to allow adequate testing.

The extra information to include in the commit would look something like

PR:                 foo/54321
Submitted by:       John Smith <John.Smith@example.com>
Reviewed by:        -arch
Obtained from:      NetBSD
MFC after:          1 month

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