Joachim Breitner wrote:

> Just curious: How do you create these patches so easily, so that it’s
> worth the effort?

I have a small shell fragment that takes a package name as an argument (and
optionally a bug number) and essentially loops over printing the relevant
submit@ or control@ headers and the output of "diff foo.orig foo". Pressing
ENTER refreshes the patch. When I am happy, I copy paste the output into my
mail client, attach the diff (which was also tee'd to somewhere in /tmp) and
send it.

I could probably get rid of the manual copy-paste steps if I worked out how
to seed an email message with my client.

> For a one word change I would not create a patch but tell the maintainer
> what to do, assuming it’s less work for him to change that word than save
> the patch somewhere and apply it.

Whilst English may the default language of Debian, patches simply cross the
language barrier quicker and easier irrespective of the recipient's
native language. As a bonus, they can be applied with little or no work by
the maintainer, which helps getting changes made quicker. They can--of
course--not use my patch; but by that point it has already served most of
it's purpose as a communication tool.

This bug was probably a borderline case, but as it took less than 30 seconds
to do from noticing the typo and it leaving my mail server, it was probably
still worth it.


Best wishes,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      [EMAIL PROTECTED]
       `-

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