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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outdated patches.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We do not accept patches for releases or outdated CVS versions.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.
Create the diff from the root of the MPlayer source tree, this makes the
diff easier to apply as it saves the step of changing to the correct
directory.
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 cosmetic changes!
NOTE: If you already 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. If you make independent changes, try to send them as separate patches
in separate mails. Likewise, if your patch is very big, try splitting
it into several self-contained pieces. Each part can then be reviewed
and committed separately. Logical units should stay together, though,
e.g. do not send a patch for every file you change.
8. Send your patch to the mplayer-dev-eng mailing list as a base64-encoded
attachment with the subject line:
'[PATCH] very short description of the patch'.
In the mail, describe in a few sentences what you change and why.
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.
Do not compress your patch unless it is larger than 80k or if you know
that your mailer messes up (reformats) text attachments. It only makes
handling the patch more difficult. If you have to compress your patch,
use either bzip2, gzip or zip to compress it, not a different format.
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
but unset the "Mail delivery" option so that you can post without getting
any mails.
Do not upload the patch to a web or FTP site, send it directly to the
mailing list. The fewer steps it takes us to get at the patch the higher
the likelihood for it to get reviewed and applied. If your patch is so
big you cannot send it by mail, try splitting it into smaller pieces.
9. 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,
send a reminder asking for opinions as a reply to the original patch and
mention that you got ignored. We are interested in your work and will
eventually either accept it or reject it with an explanation of what we
disliked about your patch. We will often ask you to make changes to your
patch to make it acceptable. Implement them if you want to see your patch
applied and send the update to the mailing list. Remember that updates and
reminders must be sent as replies to the original patch to preserve proper
mail threading.
10. Do not immediately ask for CVS write access. If you have 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.
11. For consistency reasons, all option names must use '-' instead of '_'.
12. If you make a nontrivial contribution and wish to be mentioned in the
AUTHORS file, include that in your patch.
13. Do not use printf for console output, use our own mp_msg functions instead.
For the output to be translated (which includes all messages of level
MSGL_HINT and below), put the strings in help/help_mp-en.h. If you change
strings, remove the occurrences of these strings from the translations.
There may be (compilation) trouble if outdated translations remain in place
and translators will pick up changes more easily if they see a new message
that has to be translated.
Thank you!
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