[sldev] Good patch practice

Bryan O'Sullivan bos at lindenlab.com
Thu May 31 10:50:50 PDT 2007


Hi, everyone -

I've been applying a lot of patches from outside contributors over the 
past week; we are all very grateful for people's submissions.  Reviewing 
and applying patches is surprisingly time consuming, so I would very 
much appreciate it if people were to follow a few simple guidelines when 
submitting patches.

Please read and follow the coding standard: 
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Coding_standard

Please do not add issue numbers or your name to patches.  We have to 
remove these by hand.  Also, please be careful in how you add comments. 
  Bracketing a patch with comments like "// PATCH START" and "// PATCH 
END" does not add any information, and adds to the manual cleanup we 
have to do.

Each patch should do exactly one thing.  If you have three different 
bugs to fix, please submit three different patches.  When you fold 
unrelated hunks into a single patch, we have to try to figure out which 
part of the patch applies to which bug, and split it out by hand, 
sometimes into several patches.  Combo patches are particularly time 
consuming, and the manual splitting up makes it very easy to lose pieces 
of patches altogether.

The best way to think about patches is that the people who are reviewing 
and applying your patches are the bottleneck in the system.  If you can 
make it easier for us to understand and apply patches without lots of 
cleanup, we can spend more time reviewing and incorporating your work.

Thank you, and keep up the wonderful work!

	<b


More information about the SLDev mailing list