On 07/01/2008, at 23:21, Aleksey Cheusov wrote:
It is not as easy as you make it sound. Many, many times, putting all the patches together and removing pkgsrc-specific bits will result in a patch that will NOT be accepted by upstream. The reason: the patch will contain fixes and/or improvements for many different, unrelated stuff.
Amount af efforts for sorting patches into logical blocks is well known. The question is WHEN these efforts are necessary. Every time you change even one line in source code to keep your patches/ in a consistent state? Or once before sending them to upstream maintainer. I'd prefer to do this once.
Mmm, sorry? I don't understand you here.
Upstream wants patches
As an upstream maintainer I'd tell you that I personally DO NOT NEED user's patches at all and in truth I don't like them. Most often all these patches are not good enough to be applied for a number of reasons. So, I personally prefer bug report when user describe his problem and nothing else. It is enough and I always tell them "thank you".
Maybe you don't. But I've had lots of patches integrated verbatim into mainstream sources. Providing good patches is a good, if not the best, way to gain confidence from the maintainers, and this can later make you get commit access. You cannot gain such confidence from explanations alone: you can describe things very well at a theoretical level but be a poor programmer.
-- Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84%gmail.com@localhost>