4. Creating Patches

If you have made any changes to the NMM source code and you want us to test your changes or add them to the CVS, you can send us a patch. To make sure we can use your patch, please follow the instructions below.

• Go to the root directory of your NMM checkout and do a

  cvs update

  This is important, so the patch is made against the current CVS version. You should not send us patches to older versions of NMM.

  Note: If changes have been made in the repository, you may have to resolve conflicts. You should also check if your code still works before you go on with creating the patch.

  Please tell us the exact date and time of your last cvs update or checkout, so we know to what version the patch must be applied.

• If you added any files to the NMM source tree, add them with the command

  cvs add

  followed by the filename of the file(s) you added. If you removed any files, delete them and remove them with

  cvs remove

  also followed by the filename(s).

  These commands do not make any changes to the sourceforge CVS. They are necessary when making patches, so CVS knows which files to include to the patch. Also, the information which files have been added or removed is part of the patch.

  If you are not registered as a developer, i.e. you have no write access to the repository, then CVS will not accept the cvs add and cvs remove commands. You will have to exclude removed files from the patch (see below) and send us new files separately.

• In the root directory of your NMM checkout, run the command

  cvs diff -N -u > my.patch

  where my.patch is the name of the patch file to create. The patch will contain all changes you made to your checkout of NMM.

  If you only want to include part of your changes in the patch, just add the names of the files and directories at the end of the command line. Note that CVS works recursively for directories.

  Please always run the cvs diff command in the root directory! In this way we don't have to know in which directory you created the patch. We can apply the patch directly in the root directory, which saves us some work.

• Remove all lines at the beginning of the patch file that start with a ?. Unfortunately there seems to be no command-line option for CVS to suppress output of these lines so you have to do that by hand.