reasons for not accepting the patch

[Dan Kegel]

2006/8/12, Vijay Kiran Kamuju <infyquest at gmail.com>:
> [Why wasn't the patch
>  http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2006-July/029145.html
> accepted?]

I looked at this a couple days ago, and sent this to the patches' author
to encourage him to repost it:

-- snip ---
1. The patch is missing the filename header, and cannot be applied
to the sources by running 'patch'.

2.  the patch was posted with the following legal notice:

"Notice: The information contained in this e-mail
message and/or attachments to it may contain
confidential or privileged information. If you are
not the intended recipient, any dissemination, use,
review, distribution, printing or copying of the
information contained in this e-mail message
and/or attachments to it are strictly prohibited."

That tells us "You may not use this patch."
You have to post patches without that.

3. the message did not contain any license information (e.g.
 Author: Renu Rajput (Tata Inc.)
 Copyright 2006 Tata Inc
 License: LGPL.
Adding that would help.

4. The message essentially repeated much of the bug report in bugzilla.
That's not needed.  Just refer to the bug report.

Any one of the above four might have been enough to cause the
patch to be ignored.  Fix them all and you've got a good shot.

Two more tips:

5. The bug report in bugzilla does not link to your proposed fix.
Often after I post a proposed fix, I add a comment to bugzilla saying
something like
"Patch sent:
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2006-July/029145.html"
Not only does this give another way for people to stumble across and
review your patch, it also helps avoid duplication of effort.
I had no idea you had sent in a patch for this bug already!

6. Patches that do not get applied need to be resent after a few days.
Every time you resend it, you should try to improve it or the test case
a bit, and make sure it still applies against current cvs or git.
Use the same subject line as before, but append "(resend)" to the end.

Patches are like TCP/IP.  There is no ACK when a packet is corrupt,
you have to resend after correcting a bit error!
--- snip ---

Hope that helps.
- Dan