annotate DOCS/tech/patches.txt @ 12701:4e0acc8d3622

Explain that commenting string operations is important. patch by Alexander Strasser <[e-mail]>

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outdated patches.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    We do not accept patches for releases or outdated CVS versions.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 be
    applied easily 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).
    Always document string operations! Comment on what you are doing
    and why it is safe. This makes it easy to review and change your
    code if needed. 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!