Chapter 14. The SME Server development environment

Table of Contents
Configuring your development environment
Modifying an SME Server package
SourceForge developer CVS access

Configuring your development environment

The SME Server source code is checked into CVS at SourceForge. The project has a SourceForge page at https://sourceforge.net/projects/smeserver/. All packages are built using mezzanine, and an overview of mezzanine is provided here: https://wiki.caosity.org/tiki-index.php?page=Package+Maintenance

Reminder: The SME Server is released under the GPL

The SME Server source code is released under the GPL. You must release the source code to all modifications. If you make improvements, please raise a bug and attach a patch so the change can be discussed and pulled back into the base for everyone to share.

Do I need a SourceForge account?

Not really. Only developers who are going to put patches back into CVS and build new packages need SourceForge CVS access. The sources are freely available and patches are gratefully received. Just follow the instructions in this section and attach the patch(es) to the Bugzilla entry, explaining why the change should be made.

Add some useful aliases

Mezzanine needs to know to use the SourceForge CVS repository in order to checkout/get or import a package. Once a package is checked out from SourceForge, mezzanine/CVS will remember where it came from and check it back into the same CVS repository. You should not set the CVSROOT environment variable as it makes it too easy to accidentally import code into the wrong CVS repository when working with multiple repositories.

Add the following lines to ~/.bashrc (or a file such as /etc/profile.d/smebuild.sh to configure it for all users on this machine):

export CVS_RSH=ssh # tell CVS to use ssh

# DO NOT set CVSROOT
sf_cvsroot=smeserver.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/smeserver
sf_cvsroot_anon=:pserver:anonymous@smeserver.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/smeserver

alias mzgetsf="mzget --dir $sf_cvsroot"
alias mzimportsf="mzimport --dir $sf_cvsroot"

alias mzgetsf_anon="mzget --dir $sf_cvsroot_anon"

You can now use the mzgetsf_anon (or msgetsf if you have a developer account) to retrieve a package from SourceForge. If you use mzget, you will get an error message to remind you that CVSROOT has not been set, and should not be set. Note that you can use the other mezzanine commands, such as mzclean and mzsync normally as the CVS repository is already known.

[gordonr@smebuild tmp]$ mzget smeserver-yum
cvs checkout: No CVSROOT specified!  Please use the `-d' option
cvs [checkout aborted]: or set the CVSROOT environment variable.
An unknown error must have occured, because the command returned 256

Create your work area

It is a good idea to perform all of your checkouts in a standard directory hierarchy. This makes it easier to move around between the packages. On a shared build server, it also makes it easier for people to recover your work if required (for example when you are on holidays). If you want to use filesharing to edit files from a networked PC, you might like to use ~/home/smeserver/. On a shared build server, you might even use something like /builds/users/$LOGNAME/smeserver/ so the files are not in your home directory and are accessible to all developers.

Note: Reminder: All files must be checked in using Unix text format.

[gordonr@smebuild ~]$ mkdir ~/smeserver

[gordonr@smebuild ~]$ cd ~/smeserver