(octave.info)Sending Patches

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D.2.4 Sending Patches for Octave
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If you would like to write bug fixes or improvements for Octave, that is
very helpful.  When you send your changes, please follow these
guidelines to avoid causing extra work for us in studying the patches.

   If you don’t follow these guidelines, your information might still be
useful, but using it will take extra work.  Maintaining Octave is a lot
of work in the best of circumstances, and we can’t keep up unless you do
your best to help.

   • Send an explanation with your changes of what problem they fix or
     what improvement they bring about.  For a bug fix, just include a
     copy of the bug report, and explain why the change fixes the bug.

   • Always include a proper bug report for the problem you think you
     have fixed.  We need to convince ourselves that the change is right
     before installing it.  Even if it is right, we might have trouble
     judging it if we don’t have a way to reproduce the problem.

   • Include all the comments that are appropriate to help people
     reading the source in the future understand why this change was
     needed.

   • Don’t mix together changes made for different reasons.  Send them
     _individually_.

     If you make two changes for separate reasons, then we might not
     want to install them both.  We might want to install just one.

   • Use ‘diff -c’ to make your diffs.  Diffs without context are hard
     for us to install reliably.  More than that, they make it hard for
     us to study the diffs to decide whether we want to install them.
     Unified diff format is better than contextless diffs, but not as
     easy to read as ‘-c’ format.

     If you have GNU diff, use ‘diff -cp’, which shows the name of the
     function that each change occurs in.

   • Write the change log entries for your changes.

     Read the ‘ChangeLog’ file to see what sorts of information to put
     in, and to learn the style that we use.  The purpose of the change
     log is to show people where to find what was changed.  So you need
     to be specific about what functions you changed; in large
     functions, it’s often helpful to indicate where within the function
     the change was made.

     On the other hand, once you have shown people where to find the
     change, you need not explain its purpose.  Thus, if you add a new
     function, all you need to say about it is that it is new.  If you
     feel that the purpose needs explaining, it probably does—but the
     explanation will be much more useful if you put it in comments in
     the code.

     If you would like your name to appear in the header line for who
     made the change, send us the header line.