Ada mainline

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Diego Novillo wrote:

> > It's not always clear what constitutes a "single individual patch".
> >
> Have you read and understood http://gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html?  If
> that doesn't answer your questions, we should probably add the missing
> bits.

Also note that the principle of minimal individual patches is not new.  
It's something I moved from the manual to contribute.html.  The following 
are extracts from gcc.texi in GCC 2.2.2, and the principles apply just as 
much now as they did then:

# Send an explanation with your changes of what problem they fix or what
# improvement they bring about.  For a bug fix, just include a copy of the
# bug report, and explain why the change fixes the bug.

# Always include a proper bug report for the problem you think you have
# fixed.  We need to convince ourselves that the change is right before
# installing it.  Even if it is right, we might have trouble judging it if
# we don't have a way to reproduce the problem.

# Don't mix together changes made for different reasons.
# Send them @emph{individually}.

# If you make two changes for separate reasons, then we might not want to
# install them both.  We might want to install just one.  If you send them
# all jumbled together in a single set of diffs, we have to do extra work
# to disentangle them---to figure out which parts of the change serve
# which purpose.  If we don't have time for this, we might have to ignore
# your changes entirely.

# If you send each change as soon as you have written it, with its own
# explanation, then the two changes never get tangled up, and we can
# consider each one properly without any extra work to disentangle them.

# Ideally, each change you send should be impossible to subdivide into
# parts that we might want to consider separately, because each of its
# parts gets its motivation from the other parts.

# Send each change as soon as that change is finished.  Sometimes people
# think they are helping us by accumulating many changes to send them all
# together.  As explained above, this is absolutely the worst thing you
# could do.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
  http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/#c90status - status of C90 for GCC 3.5
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    jsm28@gcc.gnu.org (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)