SubmittingPatches
From Audacity Wiki
If you've made a change to Audacity that you'd like to share with us, please send us a patch to look at! A patch is a file listing the line-by-line differences between one set of files and another, in this case, between your files and ours in CVS .
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[edit] Which version of Audacity should I patch?
We suggest that you always patch against CVS HEAD if at all possible. If your patch is a tiny bug fix, you're welcome to submit a patch against the Audacity stable branch. Patch files are designed to be "redundant", meaning that if the source you are using out of date, the patch "might" still work, and it's unlikely to change the wrong lines. The current command line usage for this is:
| cvs update -r AUDACITY_1_2 |
or:
| cvs checkout -r AUDACITY_1_2 audacity |
If your patch adds a new feature, or is a major change, please submit your patch against the unstable development branch of Audacity, or ideally against CVS HEAD .
[edit] How to create a patch
[edit] *.nix
Inside of an Audacity CVS directory, just type:
| cvs diff -u > patchfile |
Alternatively, download a fresh copy of Audacity, make two copies of the directory, and then run recursive diff from the command line as follows:
| diff -r -u audacity audacity-patched > patchfile |
The "-u" switch produces a file in "unified diff format" which is easier to read and includes proper context information. If you find it easier, Xfdiff is graphic interface to the GNU diff and patch commands.
[edit] Windows
You can create diff files with the GnuWin32 DiffUtils, and apply patches with Patch.
If you use TortoiseCVS, it has a handy right-click context menu item CVS > Make Patch.... Right-click over the root folder of the tree to make sure all relevant files are included in the patch. You can uncheck any that are not relevant in the Make Patch dialogue.
[edit] Where should I send it?
Please subscribe to the Audacity-Devel mailing list. Then send us an e-mail with a concise summary of what your patch does, and attach it as a plain text attachment. It would be greatly appreciated if you could also list the patch on our unreviewed patches page following the instructions there. We all get a lot of e-mail, and that will make it easier to keep track of your patch.
If you receive an automated response that the patch is being held for moderation because it is too large, be patient, we'll let it through. If the patch is too large to attach to an e-mail, please upload it to a web site and give us a link to where it can be downloaded, or tell us the patch is too large and we'll make other arrangements to look at it.
[edit] Why are you ignoring me?
The Audacity developers don't mean to be rude. We will try to respond quickly in full, or failing that, acknowledge your e-mail and let you know when we hope to respond. Some of the reasons we might not accept your patch or respond to your e-mail immediately include:
- You didn't patch the proper version of Audacity. If you send us a patch for Audacity an obsolete version of Audacity, not only will it be difficult for us to port your patch to the latest code, but it may not even be relevant.
- Your patch is very long - it might take us a while to sort through it and figure out what you did. We welcome contributions, but we like to understand what they do.
- We're worried that the patch might have unintended consequences - the patch might work great for you, but we've been working with this code for a long time, and we might be anticipating a potential problem that might not be immediately obvious to you.
- We're busy. We all work on this in our spare time. If for example you contact us around the time of a new release, it may be difficult to respond promptly. If you don't see anything wrong with your patch and you haven't heard anything after a week, please send a reminder e-mail to -devel list using the same subject as the original e-mail. If we're still ignoring you a week later, remind us again! We'll at least try to give you some idea why we haven't responded yet. As soon as we can, we will review your patch and let you know if we can commit it.
