Re: contributing to Emacs

[Konstantin Kharlamov <hi-angel@yandex.ru>]

On Sun, 2023-06-18 at 18:12 +0800, Po Lu wrote:
> Konstantin Kharlamov <hi-angel@yandex.ru> writes:
> 
> > Okay, so, here's an obvious one: a patch series sent to
> > bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> > should not create separate bugreports for every patch.
> > 
> > In ML-managed projects it is typical to send patches as a series, and when
> > you
> > doing that results in such surprising behaviour, it creates an additional
> > emotional and mental load both for you and for maintainers who would need to
> > do
> > something with these separate reports.
> 
> What's a ``patch series''?
> 
> Typically, free software maintainers expect patches to be a single
> context format diff, containing either edits to the appropriate
> ChangeLog file(s), or with ChangeLog entries prepended.

Ideally, each commit in the repository should contain minimal functional
changes. It allows for easier code review at the moment and for better figuring
out why some change was done later in the life of the project. Usually at this
point I refer people to this old article from kernel HID subsystem maintainer
and libinput creator http://who-t.blogspot.com/2009/12/on-commit-messages.html
Old — but gold! 😄

When project contributions are done via mailing list (such as kernel, gdb, gcc,
and in the past were also Xorg and Mesa), you usually turn a number of commits
to separate patches and send them. E.g. here's one example:
https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20230612104658.1386996-1-tvrtko.ursulin@linux.intel.com/
it starts with a "zero patch" that is the title of the series, and then
individual patches follow.