annotate DOCS/tech/patches.txt @ 12419:3a6e4fff88e3

Hint at diff options useful for avoiding cosmetic changes, patch by Reimar.

Sending patches:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Note: We know our rules place a burden on you, but rest assured that
maintaining a big and complex software project is even harder, so please
accept our rules. We cannot afford to spend our time fixing buggy, broken or
outdated patches. The closer you follow our rules the higher is the probability
that your patch will be included.

0. Do not send complete files. These need to be diffed by hand to see the
   changes, which makes reviews harder and less likely to occur. Besides as
   soon as one of the files changes, your version becomes harder to apply,
   thus reducing its chances of being accepted.

1. Always make patches for the CVS version. The README describes how to check
   out CVS and daily CVS snapshots are available from our download page.
   We do not accept patches for releases or outdated CVS versions.

2. Make unified diffs ('diff -Naur' or 'cvs diff -u'). Unified diffs can easily
   be applied with 'patch'. This is much harder with other diff types.

3. Test the functionality of your patch. We'll *refuse* it if it breaks
   something, even if it extends other features!

4. Read your patch. We'll *refuse* it if it changes indentation of the
   code or if it does tab/space conversion or other cosmetical changes!

   NOTE: If you alread wrote some code and did cosmetic changes, you can use
   'diff -uwbBE' to help you remove them. Don't forget to check the patch
   to make sure diff didn't ignore some important change and remove any
   remaining cosmetics!

5. Comment parts that really need it (tricky side-effects etc).
   Commenting trivial code not required. Comments must be English!

6. If you implement new features, add or change command line switches or modify
   the behavior of existing features, please do not forget to also update the
   documentation. The documentation maintainers will assist you in doing this.
   Updating the English documentation is enough. If you speak several languages
   you are of course welcome to update some of the translations as well.

7. Send your patch to the mplayer-dev-eng mailing list as a base64-encoded
   attachment (use gzip or bzip2 *only* if it's bigger than 80k or if you know
   that your mailer messes up (reformats) text attachments) with the subject
   line: '[PATCH] very short description of the patch'.
   In the mail, describe in a few sentences what you change and why.
   If you made independent changes, try to send them as separate patches.
   The subject line is very important if you do not want your patch to get
   lost in the noise. We need the uppercase [PATCH] to be able to search
   for unapplied patches, so please use it.
   You have to subscribe to mplayer-dev-eng since we blocked postings from
   non-subscribers after spam problems and because patches get reviewed by the
   developers on the list. We want you to be available for discussing your
   code, you might be asked to make modifications before we accept it. Don't
   worry, mplayer-dev-eng is not high traffic and you can subscribe with the
   nomail option if you do not wish to receive all the mails.

8. Give us a few days to react. We try to review patches as fast as possible,
   but unfortunately we are constantly overloaded with work, be it MPlayer
   related or from our day to day lives. If your patch seems to be ignored,
   please resend it and mention that you got ignored. We are interested in your
   work and will eventually either accept it or reject it with an explanation
   what and why we disliked about your patch.

9. Do not immediately ask for CVS write access. If you contributed one or more
   nice, acceptable patches and they need maintaining or you want to be an
   MPlayer developer, you'll get CVS write access.

10. For consistency reasons all option names must use '-' instead of '_'.

11. If you made a nontrivial contribution and wish to be mentioned in the
    AUTHORS file, include that in your patch.

12. Do not compress your patch unless it is very large. It only makes handling
    the patch more difficult.

Thank you!