depot_tools/README

# Copyright (c) 2006-2008 The Chromium Authors. All rights reserved.
# Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be
# found in the LICENSE file.

depot_tools provides a set of tools for managing the Chromium
software development cycle in a consistent way across platforms.

This directory pulls together wrappers around, and (for some platforms)
pre-built binaries of, various necessary tools.

The intent is to try to make things "just work" for individuals
participating in Chromium development, while also supporting uprades
of these tool and wrappers without any action on the developers' parts.

Trying to make things drop-dead-simple for developers causes the process
of making changes to *these* tools and wrappers themselves to be a little
more complicated.  This is a good tradeoff, but it means you need to
follow directions.  In particular:

  DO NOT EDIT FILES IN-PLACE IN THE PUBLICLY-VISIBLE DIRECTORIES
  (linux/, mac/, win/ or release/).  EDIT THEM IN THE src SUBDIRECTORY
  AND FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS TO PROPAGATE YOUR CHANGES TO THE OTHER
  PUBLIC DIRECTORIES.


Directory Layout
================

  linux/
  mac/
  win/

    These are the publicly-visible "bootstrap" directories.  People who
    already have Subversion installed can sync directly from these
    directories to get started.  The contents are just thin wrapper
    scripts that call into the utilities in the release/ directory,
    after possibly updating their contents from the publicly-visible URL.

    DO NOT EDIT FILES IN THESE DIRECTORIES DIRECTLY.  Make changes to
    the underlying files underneath the src/ directory and follow the
    procedures to update these directories and check in the results.

  release/

    This contains the publicly-visible directories that get updated
    by the wrappers, to keep the toolchain up-to-date without any
    explicit action on the developer's part.

    DO NOT EDIT THINGS IN THIS DIRECTORY DIRECTLY.  Make changes to
    the underlying files underneath the src/ directory and follow the
    procedures to update this directory and check in the results.

  bin/

    Utility scripts for working on these depot_tools:  managing our
    process of building the publicly-visible directories from the
    underlying src/, and making the contents visible by checking in
    the updates.

  development/
    development/linux/
    development/mac/
    development/win/
    development/release/

    This hierarchy gets checked in so that people working on
    depot_tools have a place to update and test downloads from
    a live SVN server without changing the public, released
    stuff in {linux,mac,release,win}.

  doc/

    Various documents describing what's going on here.

  src/

    THIS IS THE DIRECTORY IN WHICH YOU SHOULD MAKE CHANGES.