[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
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