On Saturday 04 October 2008 20:04:16 Richard Jones wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 04, 2008 at 08:41:35PM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> > I submitted the following trivial fix over a year ago:
> >
> >   http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=4338
>
> This makes the mistake of supplying a lump of code instead of a patch.
> It's a very common mistake, so don't feel bad about it.

I don't think it is a mistake in this context because my patch could not have 
been applied.

> In fact it 
> happens so much with libvirt that I cowrote the following section to
> cover it:
>
> http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/how-to-supply-code-to-open-source-projects/#pa
>tches
>
> Rich.
>
> ObComment: People at Red Hat deal with patches almost as a form of
> currency.  Typically I'll send and receive a dozen patches a day, and
> the kernel developers probably deal with ten times as many.  The
> interesting thing is that the actual diff / patch format is very
> crude.  It's crying out for someone to invent a tool which actually
> understands the syntax of the code in the files (not just as plain
> text) and creates a more robust and easier to read format.

Suppling a patch certainly makes perfect sense when the maintainer can just 
apply the patch upstream but, AFAIK, that is not the case here.

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e