5.3 Developing Patches

The first part of developing a patch is the same as for developers without commit access:

1. Develop the code and test it.
2. Update the ChangeLog.
3. If necessary, update the documentation: doc/gawktexi.in and/or doc/gawk.1.
4. Use ‘git diff > mychange.diff’ to create a patch file. (If you want, remove the diffs for generated files.)
5. Send it to the mailing list for discussion.
6. Iterate until the patch is ready to be committed.

However, now that you have commit access, you can commit the fix and push it up to the repo yourself! Let’s assume you’ve made a bug fix directly on master. Here’s how to commit your changes:

$ git diff            Review the patch one more time
$ git add …         Add any files for committing
$ git commit          Commit the files, with a commit message
$ git push            Push the files up to the repo.  Ta da!

The first three steps are the same described earlier (see Starting A New Branch). The ‘git push’ is what’s new, and it updates the repo on Savannah. Congratulations!

As a courtesy, you should send a note to the mailing list indicating that you have pushed your change.