[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Moving a sourceforge project to arch

[Martin Pool]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 01:15:38 -0800, Michael McCracken wrote:

> Thanks everyone for the advice.
> 
> I was talking about people sending me tarballs, as well as people 
> saying "I would contribute, but I don't want to learn CVS". I can't say 
> I like it, but I'd like to accommodate them. So they don't want to use 
> cvs diff, but they might be happy with a script like 'send_changes' or 
> something. Essentially, I have non-programmers wanting to try their 
> hand at hacking on my code, and I want to make it easy, but I don't 
> want to have to swim through tarballs. That said, Charles' suggestion 
> should be useful.

I have dealt with some similar contributors.  In my case they were
supplying localizations so it really was something where very
non-technical users could contribute something that I could never do
myself.

One way to accommodate them would be to have a cron job make nightly
snapshots as tarballs, including {arch}.  Perhaps you can persuade
them to copy files to .orig before they modify them, and then to send
you the diffs from that.

Some people will not be happy with even that, and they can perhaps
just send you the complete modified files or tarball.  You'll need to
do the merge by hand, but if the contributions are sufficiently
valuable (e.g. they speak Swedish and you don't) it might be
worthwhile.

Indeed, perhaps you should just try to make more frequent releases, so
that they can work from the last release.

You might also try giving people a little shell script that registers
the archive and gets the tree.

-- 
Martin