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Patching Procedures
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Patching Procedures
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<p>A distribution so widely used as this one eventually develops
numerous barnacles as the result of <a href="porting.html">porting</a>
to new systems, idiosyncratic new features and just plain bugs. In order
to help keep order and make maintenance bearable, we ask that proposed
changes to the distribution be submitted in the following form.

<ol>

<li>Please submit patches to <a
href="http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills">David L. Mills
(mills@udel.edu)</a> in the form of either unified-diffs (<code>diff
-u</code>) or context-diffs (<code>diff -c</code>).

<p><li>Please include the <strong>output</strong> from
<code>config.guess</code> in the description of your patch.  If
<code>config.guess</code> does not produce any output for your machine,
please fix that, too!

<p><li>Please base the patch on the root directory of the distribution.
The preferred procedure here is to copy your patch to the root directory
and mumble

<p><code>patch -p &lt;your_patch&gt;</code>

<p><li>Please avoid patching the RCS subdirectories; better yet, clean
them out before submitting patches.

<p><li>If you have whole new files, as well as patches, wrap the files
and patches in a shell script. If you need to compress it, use either
GNU zip or the stock Unix compress utility.

<p><li>Don't forget the documentation that may be affected by the patch.
Send us patches for the <code>./html</code> files as well. See the <a
href="HTMLPrimer.html">A Beginner's Guide to HTML</a> page for a
tutorial.

<p><li>We would be glad to include your name, electric address and
descriptive phrase in the <a href="copyright.html">Copyright</a> page,
if you wish.

</ol>

<p>Prior to xntp3-5.83 (releases up to and including xntp3.5f) a
complete patch history back to the dark ages was kept in the
<code>./patches</code> directory, which might have been helpful to see
if the same problem occured in another port, etc.  Patches were saved in
that directory with file name in the form <code>patch.<i>nnn</i></code>,
where <i>nnn</i> was approaching 200. All patches in that directory have
been made; so, if yours was there, it was in the distribution.

<p>Since we have been getting multple patches for some bugs, plus many
changes are implemented locally, no two maintainers here use the same
tools, and since we're not using any bug-tracking software or even
source code control, there is currently no tracking of specific changes.

<p>The best way to see what's changed between two distributions is to
run a <code>diff</code> against them.

<p>Thanks for your contribution and happy chime.

<hr><address>David L. Mills (mills@udel.edu)</address></body></html>
