[gnome-love] How to help fix build bugs?

[Darryl Rees <rees netnam vn>]

I've come across a few build bugs that seem to hang around for a long 
time (some only show up for --enable-gtk-docs, so I guess lots of folk 
building from CVS don't  generally enable gtk-docs. In other cases, I 
have no idea why no-one else seems to notice them).

Generally these problems are trivially fixable - so assuming that I 
think I've found a problem and worked out how to fix it:

Question 1: Is it most appropriate to send an email to one of the 
maintainers, file a bug, email the mailing list, or none of the above.

Question 2: Should one _always_ send a patch, or for very trivial fixes 
it is appropriate to say 'Hey you need to stick a AC_PROG_RANLIB in your 
main configure.in file', and let the person who's going to fix it edit 
it manually.

(for elucidation the example in question 2 pertains to sodipodi HEAD. 
Another build problem example is libegg HEAD where files in the doc 
subdir refer to eggcellrendererpixbuf.h which was deleted late december.)

Regards,
Darryl Rees.