68 lines
2.7 KiB
HTML
68 lines
2.7 KiB
HTML
<html><head><title>
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Patching Procedures
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</title></head><body><h3>
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Patching Procedures
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</h3>
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<p>A distribution so widely used as this one eventually develops
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numerous barnacles as the result of <a href=porting.htm>porting</a>
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to new systems, idiosyncratic new features and just plain bugs. In order
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to help keep order and make maintenance bearable, we ask that proposed
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changes to the distribution be submitted in the following form.
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<ol>
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<p><li>Please submit patches to <a href=mailto:mills@udel.edu>David L.
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Mills <mills@udel.edu></a> in the form of either unified-diffs
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(<tt>diff -u</tt>) or context-diffs (<tt>diff -c</tt>).</li>
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<p><li>Please include the <strong>output</strong> from
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<tt>config.guess</tt> in the description of your patch. If
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<tt>config.guess</tt> does not produce any output for your machine,
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please fix that, too!</li>
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<p><li>Please base the patch on the root directory of the distribution.
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The preferred procedure here is to copy your patch to the root directory
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and mumble</li>
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<p><tt>patch -p <your_patch></tt></li>
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<p><li>Please avoid patching the RCS subdirectories; better yet, clean
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them out before submitting patches.</li>
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<p><li>If you have whole new files, as well as patches, wrap the files
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and patches in a shell script. If you need to compress it, use either
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GNU zip or the stock Unix compress utility.</li>
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<p><li>Don't forget the documentation that may be affected by the patch.
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Send us patches for the <tt>./html</tt> files as well. See the <a
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href=htmlprimer.htm>A Beginner's Guide to HTML</a> page for a
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tutorial.</li>
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<p><li>We would be glad to include your name, electric address and
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descriptive phrase in the <a href=copyright.htm>Copyright</a> page,
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if you wish.</li>
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</ol>
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<p>Prior to ntp3-5.83 (releases up to and including ntp3.5f) a
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complete patch history back to the dark ages was kept in the
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<tt>./patches</tt> directory, which might have been helpful to see
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if the same problem occured in another port, etc. Patches were saved in
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that directory with file name in the form <tt>patch.<i>nnn</i></tt>,
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where <i>nnn</i> was approaching 200. All patches in that directory have
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been made; so, if yours was there, it was in the distribution.
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<p>Since we have been getting multple patches for some bugs, plus many
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changes are implemented locally, no two maintainers here use the same
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tools, and since we're not using any bug-tracking software or even
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source code control, there is currently no tracking of specific changes.
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<p>The best way to see what's changed between two distributions is to
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run a <tt>diff</tt> against them.
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<p>Thanks for your contribution and happy chime.
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<hr><a href=index.htm>Home</a><address><a
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href=mailto:mills@udel.edu> David L. Mills <mills@udel.edu></a>
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</address></a></body></html>
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