Node:Submitting patches, Previous:Partition table, Up:Internals

Where and how you should send patches

When you write patches for GRUB, please send them to the mailing list [email protected]. Here is the list of items of which you should take care:

• Please make your patch as small as possible. Generally, it is not a good thing to make one big patch which changes many things. Instead, segregate features and produce many patches.
• Use as late code as possible, for the original code. The CVS repository always has the current version (see Obtaining and Building GRUB).
• Write ChangeLog entries. See Change Logs, if you don't know how to write ChangeLog.
• Make patches in unified diff format. diff -urN is appropriate in most cases.
• Don't make patches reversely. Reverse patches are difficult to read and use.
• Be careful enough of the license term and the copyright. Because GRUB is under GNU General Public License, you may not steal code from software whose license is incompatible against GPL. And, if you copy code written by others, you must not ignore their copyrights. Feel free to ask GRUB maintainers, whenever you are not sure what you should do.
• If your patch is too large to send in e-mail, put it at somewhere we can see. Usually, you shouldn't send e-mail over 20K.