Re: [HACKERS] Patch Submission Guidelines

On Thursday 16 February 2006 00:27, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Treat <xzilla@users.sourceforge.net> writes:
> > !         <li>The patch should be generated in contextual diff format and
> > should !         be applicable from the root directory. If you are unfamiliar
> > with !         this, you might find the script
> > <I>src/tools/makediff/difforig</I> !         useful.  Unified diffs are only
> > preferrable if the file changes are !         single-line changes and do not
> > rely on the surrounding lines.</li>
>
> I'd like the policy to be "contextual diffs are preferred", full stop.
> Unidiffs are more compact but they sacrifice readability of the patch
> (IMHO anyway) and when you are preparing a patch you should be thinking
> first in terms of making it readable for the reviewers/committers.
>
> Some things that follow along with the readability mandate, and should
> be brought out somewhere here:
>   * avoid unnecessary whitespace changes.  They just distract the
>     reviewer, and your formatting changes will probably not survive
>     the next pgindent run anyway.

would diff -c --ignore-space-change be better?

>   * try to follow the project's code-layout conventions; again, this
>     makes it easier for the reviewer, and there's no long-term point
>     in trying to do it differently than pgindent would.
>

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL