Jikes Patches Guidelines

The Jikes project welcomes patches, but cannot promise that every patch submitted will be accepted. Patches should be attached to an entry in the patch queue.

Here are some guidelines on submitting a patch. If you make it hard for us to evaluate and incorporate the patch, then it is less likely we will include it; for example, please:

• Patch against current version of source.
• Use same coding conventions: indenting levels, position of braces, ...
• Provide a description of your patch in the standard ChangeLog format. Do not however include it as part of the patch. That is to say, do not patch ChangeLog, simply include the text with the patch. See an example ChangeLog entry below.
• Include your e-mail address in the ChangeLog notice.
• Provide the patch in diff unified output format (-u option of GNU diff).
• Generate your patch from the module name level of the tree. For example, if you need to patch ast.h the patch should be generated from within the jikes directory and reference the file as src/ast.h, rather than in the src directory referencing the file as ast.h. (It is really a minor item, but it helps immensly if we are consistent, and that is the "standard" way of doing it.)
• Create an entry in the patch queue that describes the patch, or the problem it solves (it can be as simple as saying "fixes bug #12345") and discusses the testing you've done on that patch.
• Attach your patch to the patch queue as a file, do not paste it inline.

Sample ChangeLog and Patch

This submission from Eric Blake shows the perfect patch submission:

ChangeLog:
2001-02-30  Eric Blake  <ebb9@email.byu.edu>

	* src/platform.h (operator<<): Add a cast
	to work around broken ostream << const unsigned
	char * with aCC on HP-UX.

Index: src/platform.h
===================================================================
RCS file: /usr/cvs/jikes/jikes/src/platform.h,v
retrieving revision 1.13
diff -u -r1.13 platform.h
--- src/platform.h	2001/02/12 11:09:06	1.13
+++ src/platform.h	2001/03/30 18:15:20
@@ -941,7 +941,15 @@
 
     Ostream &operator<<(const unsigned char *c)
     {
+#ifndef HAVE_OSTREAM_CONST_UNSIGNED_CHAR_PTR
+# ifdef HAVE_CONST_CAST
+        *os << const_cast<unsigned char *> (c);
+# else
+        *os << (unsigned char *) c;
+# endif
+#else
         *os << c;
+#endif
         return *this;
     }

end of patch

Some notes on this: The changelog lines are indented with a single tab, not with spaces. The "ChanegLog:" header was probably inserted by his software, just incase we didn't recognize what the following text was, but since he has followed the format this isn't a problem. The text "end of patch" has been added AFTER the end of the patch because the last line of the patch is empty. That is to say there are three lines following the last inserted line (marked with a + character) in the patch, but the last of those is empty. By adding some piece of text there that doesn't look like the start of a new patch the trailing line will not get lost and the maintainers will not have problems patching this into the tree.

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