With another round of GSoC submissions approaching, I went looking around for some better guidance on the topic of how to follow terse submission guidelines like "blend in with the surrounding code" or "remove spurious whitespace". And I didn't find any. Many mature open-source projects say things like that, but I haven't been able to find a tutorial of just what that means, or how to do it.

Now we have http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Creating_Clean_Patches to fill that role, which fits in between "Working with Git" and "Submitting a Patch" as a fairly detailed walkthrough. That should be an easier URL to point people who submit malformed patches toward than the documentation we've had before.

Advocacy aside: this page might be a good one to submit to sites that publish open-source news. It's pretty generic advice, is useful but not widely documented information, and it reflects well on our development practice. I'm trying to reverse the perception we hear about sometimes that submitting patches to PostgreSQL is unreasonably difficult. Seeing an example of how much easier it is to read a well formatted patch serves well for making people understand why the project has high expectations for formatting work. It's not pedantic, it's functionally better. I threw it onto reddit as a first spot to popularize: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/hy0aq/creating_clean_patches_with_git_diff/

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Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    g...@2ndquadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us



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