Submitting a Change to Gerrit

Carefully review the following before submitting a change. These guidelines apply to developers that are new to open source, as well as to experienced open source developers.

Change Requirements

This section contains guidelines for submitting code changes for review. For more information on how to submit a change using Gerrit, please see Gerrit.

Changes are submitted as Git commits. Each commit must contain:

  • a short and descriptive subject line that is 72 characters or fewer, followed by a blank line.
  • a change description with your logic or reasoning for the changes, followed by a blank line
  • a Signed-off-by line, followed by a colon (Signed-off-by:)
  • a Change-Id identifier line, followed by a colon (Change-Id:). Gerrit won’t accept patches without this identifier.

A commit with the above details is considered well-formed.

All changes and topics sent to Gerrit must be well-formed. Informationally, commit messages must include:

  • what the change does,
  • why you chose that approach, and
  • how you know it works – for example, which tests you ran.

Commits must build cleanly when applied in top of each other, thus avoiding breaking bisectability. Each commit must address a single identifiable issue and must be logically self-contained.

For example: One commit fixes whitespace issues, another renames a function and a third one changes the code’s functionality. An example commit file is illustrated below in detail:

A short description of your change with no period at the end

You can add more details here in several paragraphs, but please keep each line
width less than 80 characters. A bug fix should include the issue number.

Fix Issue # 7050.

Change-Id: IF7b6ac513b2eca5f2bab9728ebd8b7e504d3cebe1
Signed-off-by: Your Name <commit-sender@email.address>

Each commit must contain the following line at the bottom of the commit message:

Signed-off-by: Your Name <your@email.address>

The name in the Signed-off-by line and your email must match the change authorship information. Make sure your :file:.git/config is set up correctly. Always submit the full set of changes via Gerrit.

When a change is included in the set to enable other changes, but it will not be part of the final set, please let the reviewers know this.