I'm trying to bring the nsvhr/nsunix patches up to speed with AOLserver 3.3 and 3.4 and eventually AOLserver 4.0. It's a pretty big group of changes: some core issues were fixed in nsd/drv.c, nsunix/nsunix.c, nsvhr/nsvhr.c, and nssock/sock.cpp. These changes take what's broken and fix it. There's also group of similar changes to the same files that aren't related to virtual hosting per se that I would like to turn into patches. These changes take things that work and help them work nicer. There's other stuff too that's nice but nowhere near as related. They make development easier while keeping production the same. On the demand side, no one likes to receive big patches. Everyone wants small understandable patches that fix some small understandable problem. As a developer I want to create smaller patches that will be accepted quickly. On the supply side, it's just not clear that any patch will be accepted, or when. I don't want to submit one patch that depends on someone having loaded another patch. I would vastly prefer to submit the patches all at one time, as independent patch distributions, and not just start a time consuming process of submitting one patch, getting that accepted, and then creating the next. Patches appear to have path dependencies. It appears that at times they need to be applied in the same order they were created, and that you can't leave out any of the middle steps. What's the best way to create these patches to make them small enough and independent enough to make it easy for them to be accepted, while also striving to get the "whole" submitted and back to the community in a reasonable amount of time? What would the folks at AOL like to see? Is there some magical technical solution? How do other developers or projects handle such things? (Please no comments about not making big/broad patches in the future. Sometimes, it just doesn't seem possible to take big additions of functionality and distribute then as a small patch.) Thanks for your suggestions, Jerry ===================================================== Jerry Asher [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1678 Shattuck Avenue Suite 161 Tel: (510) 549-2980 Berkeley, CA 94709 Fax: (877) 311-8688
