generating a patch
Gerald Combs
gerald at zing.org
Mon Mar 1 22:24:58 CST 2004
Jason Clinton wrote:
> Well, I've done it. I've downloaded the source and made my first set of
> modifications to an open source product and now the maintainer would
> like me to submit a patch back to him. Question is: how do I do that? :)
Least-amount-of-work answer:
"diff -u [old_file] [new_file] > [diff_file]"
The "-u" flag creates newer-style unified diffs, which are more robust
than the default. If you've changed a bunch of stuff you may need to
run "diff -urN".
Possibly-more-work answer:
If their project has a CVS repository:
- Put "diff -u" in your .cvsrc,
- Check out the most recent version of the project
- Apply your changes
- Run "cvs diff"
The first answer makes more sense if it's a one-off patch. The second
makes more sense if you're going to provide continuous contributions.
It's much easier on the project maintainer if you're diffing against the
most up-to-date sources.
> Also, if you were maintaining an OSS project, would you be insulted if
> someone submitted a patch that fixed problems but also reformatted all
> the code to make it more readable? (I removed a ton of perlisms and
> replaced them with English.)
It depends. Some people are touch about this sort of thing. It often
helps to break the changes up into easily-digestible chunks.
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