On 09/10/2015 05:20 PM, David A Cobb wrote:
Not a problem. My first patch to upstream coreutils was done exactly
in that manner.
And, suppose for the moment, some of the changes are only relevant to
the Windows platform. I don't (yet) know how much GNU (i.e. RMS) really
gives a flying bird about making Windows play nice. So, to whom do I
propose the changes? I really, really don't want to create a private
fork. If I didn't think my ideas are worthy of pushing up the food
chain, I should just go back to bed.
Depends on how invasive your changes are. If it is truly
windows-specific and hard to maintain, then upstream probably won't pay
attention (which is why I maintain some cygwin-specific patches, such as
.exe magic manipulations, downstream-only). But if it fixes a bad
upstream assumption (such as "function foo would never do that", except
that on cygwin function foo DOES do that, and it is feasible that some
other system would do likewise), then upstream is the right place. (For
example, my very first patch to upstream coreutils is dated 2005-01-11,
where I fixed Makefile.am to deal with $(EXEEXT) - and more than just
cygwin creates binaries with .exe suffix so it is relevant upstream).
If you're unsure whether a proposed patch is worth posting upstream or
downstream, pick one place, and I'm more than willing to help you
redirect it to the other place if it wasn't appropriate. (Picking
upstream first is generally a nicer policy).