If you are going to work on many bugs, or wish to help with the many tasks involved in a release, you should create a SourceForge developer account.
You do not need a SourceForge account in order to do development. You can contribute very effectively by producing patches and attaching them to the Bugzilla entries.
Create a SourceForge user id
Contact the Development Manager (or one of the other project admins) listed on the SourceForge project page, detailing the packages you would like to work on
The project admin will add you as a developer
Upload an SSH2 key to SourceForge, following the SourceForge documentation: https://sourceforge.net/docs/F02/en/#key_posting
You will also need to generate another SSH2 key for access to the smebuild build server
Once you have SourceForge CVS access, you can use mzgetsf (instead of mzgetsf_anon) to retrieve the sources. Your copy will be writable and you will be able to put changes back to CVS. When you run mzpatch you should not see an error during the cvs add step.
[gordonr@smebuild smeserver-yum]$ mzpatch -n smeserver-yum-1.2.0-ImportKeysComment.patch Creating working directory /home/e-smith/files/users/gordonr/smeserver/smeserver-yum/work.... Created P/smeserver-yum-1.2.0-ImportKeysComment.patch (11 lines). cvs add: use 'cvs commit' to add this file permanently Patch added to SCM. Use 'mzput' to upload to repository.
Instead of attaching the patch to the Bugzilla entry, you will be able to put it back to CVS. Mezzanine normally edits the ChangeLog, but we don't need to do that as we keep the changes in the %changelog section of the SPEC file. The -m option to mzput allows a simple comment to be appended, which is all that is required:
[gordonr@smebuild smeserver-yum]$ mzput -m 'See changelog'
Official packages have unadorned release tags (e.g. smeserver-yum-1.2.0-05) and must be built on the official build servers. There are three steps involved - build the RPMs (mzbuild), sign the RPMs (rpm --addsign *.rpm) and release the RPMs (release_rpms *.rpm).
If a package has not already been checked into SourceForge CVS, you can use mzimportsf to import it. You should be careful to run this command from a directory which does not contain an imported package or mezzanine may import the package underneath the existing package.
If a new source RPM has been built without corresponding changes in SourceForge CVS, you can use mzmerge to merge in the changes. This can also be used to merge in changes from a modified upstream package. Care should be exercised with this command, especially if you want to maintain previous patches.