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

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 23 Feb 2003, Darryl Rees wrote:

> Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 22:12:32 +0700
> From: Darryl Rees <rees netnam vn>
> To: gnome-love gnome org
> Subject: [gnome-love] How to help fix build bugs?
>
> 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.

email the list is usually most effective.
and then generally you will be asked to mail the patch to the developers
directly as necessary or to attach it to a bugzilla bug.
but it depends on the project.

mailing maintainers directly is not recommended at all.  mailing lists
help spread the workload and you ask a wider base of knowledge and usually
you will get a faster response.

> Question 2: Should one _always_ send a patch, or for very trivial fixes

It is always helpful to do so.  If you can spare the time to generate a
nice "cvs diff -u patch.diff" that applies cleanly it will usually be
appreciated (but in some cases the easy fix wont be the right answer,
dont take it personally if your patch is rejected).

Patches sent to mailinglists have a tendency to get forgotten about and it
is often useful to attach patches to a bugzilla report.

> (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.)

dont know libegg but i would bet that Lauris (one of) the sodipodi
developer(s) would appreciate the patch.

> Regards,
> Darryl Rees.

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/