how development of Vim is taking place

Bram is reviewing patches and applying them upstream. The last patch state can always be found at the mercurial repository at code.google.com

When does a new release happen?

• whenever the patch count gets close to 1000
• whenever huge new features happens
• other reasons

However code.google.com is lacking some social features which is why we want to provide official bitbucket and github mirrors

official bug tracker (?):

issues @ vim @ code.google.com I don't think there is a need to change that

Thus if you want to help and don't know what to do pick an item and solve it :)

how to submit patches - ask for review?

Sent the patch or a pull request link to the vim-dev mailinglist.

which features do people work on ?

See recent-work

code formatting

Yes, this should be documented in the repo (TODO)

:set sts=4 sw=4 ts=8

However its not consistent

details github mirror:

Adding .patch to a pull request yields the diff file

Currently two exist:

• https://github.com/vim-jp/vim (very current, only master branch)
• https://github.com/b4winckler/vim (lacks behind 2 days - on 5. Juni 2013, all brannches)

TODO: Which one should we prefer making pull requests against for what reasons?

details bitbucket:

It does not exist yet ? (TODO)

why github and bitbucket mirrors?

Because both features which are of interest to the community such as being able to submit "pull requests", comment on individual lines of commits etc.

why git & mercurial mirrors only?

• github supports the SVN protocol
• It looks like git and mercurial are the two version control systems being usedmost be the community.

syncing mirrors with each other

Not supported (yet). I don't know about existing solutions. Eventually "hg-git" extension or such could be tried.

mercurial vs git ? which one is better?

Both provide advanced features. Marc Weber slightly prefers git because it has the "remotes" feature. Example:

git remote add other-developer git-url
git fetch other-developer
# list all branches, the branches from other-developer will be prefixed by the
# remote name "other-developer"
git branch -a

keeping your own work up to date

PatchBranchExtension (hg) and topgit (git) both allow to keep hacking on multiple branches which may depend on each other and keeping them up to date. Finally you can export one patch easily

Marc Weber has written a top git introduction. The PatchBranchExtension is documented at the link above very well.

Of course for mercurial there is the well known mq extension, too. mq allows to reorder patches from a stack of patches and apply/unapply them easily. topgit and PatchBranchExtension are good at managing topic branches which depend on each other.

last but not least

Do whatever works for you