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 We cannot afford to spend our time fixing buggy, broken or outdated patches.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 Subversion HEAD. The README describes how to check out Subversion and daily snapshots are available from our download page. We do not accept patches for releases or outdated Subversion revisions. 2. Make unified diffs ('svn diff' or 'diff -Naur'). Unified diffs can be applied easily with 'patch'. This is much harder with other diff types. Besides, unified diffs are more readable and thus easier to review. 3. Create the diff from the root of the MPlayer source tree, this makes the diff easier to apply as it saves the step of searching for and changing to the correct directory. 4. Test the functionality of your patch. We'll *refuse* it if it breaks something, even if it extends other features! 5. 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! To use these options directly with svn, use this command: svn diff --diff-cmd diff -x -uwbBE 6. 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! 7. 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. 8. 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, i.e. do not send a patch for every file or directory you change. 9. Send your patch to the mplayer-dev-eng mailing list as 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 send your patch as a reply to some other unrelated mail, compose a new message, otherwise it will probably get overlooked. Do not compress your patch unless it is very large 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. 10. 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. 11. Do not immediately ask for Subversion 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 Subversion write access. 12. For consistency reasons, all option names must use '-' instead of '_'. 13. If you make a nontrivial contribution and wish to be mentioned in the AUTHORS file, include that in your patch. 14. 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. 15. If you send a modified or updated version of your patch, resend the complete patch. It is very time-consuming and error-prone to piece together patches that are distributed over several mails. Please always resend patches as replies to the original mail to keep the thread with the discussion together. Thank you!