Patch submission guidelines

This page describes how to submit patches to !FDO Open Source.

Prerequisite: coding guidelines section of Getting Involved as a Contributer.

Mail patches to fdo-internals@…, with a subject line that starts with "PATCH:" in all uppercase, for example

Subject: PATCH: Fix for 64bit compilation on Linux

A patch submission should contain one logical change; please don't mix N unrelated changes in one submission — send N separate emails instead.

The patch itself should be in unified diff format (e.g., "svn diff", "diff -u" or if you are using Tortoise SVN use the "Create Patch..." command). Send the patch as an attachment, with a mime-type of text/x-diff, text/x-patch, or text/plain.

In the email message body: if the patch implements a new feature, make sure to reference the RFC (see Project Steering Committee for a description of RFCs) that describes the change; if the patch fixes a bug, reference the Trac ticket number. Also include any details that will be useful to anyone reviewing the changes.

Once the patch has been submitted, expect some feedback from reviewers of the patch. It may take several rounds of feedback before the patch is applied by a committer. If you don't get a response and don't see the patch applied, it's fine to repost and point out that you're still waiting for a response. The best person to make sure that the patch gets applied is you.