As a new committer, I will be looking at doc patches to commit.
I have looked over the instructions at: http://db.apache.org/derby/manuals/dita.html#Committing+documentation+patches and have a few questions. After I understand these steps, we might want to update the steps with a little more explanation :-) Step 3 If your machine is a different architecture from the machine on which the patch was created, convert the file. Question - Aren't all patch files diff files? How will I know that the patch was created on a different machine? I use Windows, what should I look for to know that the patch was created in UNIX? Is the syntax: unix2dos patch.diff or unix2dos > patch.diff ? Step 4 Apply the patch: patch -p0 < patch.diff Question - I am not sure what this syntax means. The name of the patch appears to be patch.diff. What then is -p0? The directional arrow indicates that the patch.diff should be going to (or redirected to) -p0. Please explain the syntax to me. Step 5 Check modifications with 'svn status' and add any files that need it: Question - So I run "svn status". Even though the person who submitted the patch has already added new files using "svn add", I will need to do it again for the new files? Is that because the svn add is only applied to the local copy of the source files? Step 7 Commit the changes. Question - There are no instructions here... is this simply done by running an svn commit command? Is there anything else that needs to be specified? What if the patch was not created at the trunk level? We should document (somewhere) what to do in that case. Other questions - Are there any specific checks that committers perform when committing documentation (vs code) patches? What if there is a problem with the commit? Will I see something immediately? What if a patch has to be backed out? Thanks! -- Laura Stewart
