View source for Push patches upstream

= Sourcing Patches = 

When you encounter problems with software, we're often not alone. For this reason its worth looking at other projects and seeing if they already have solved the problem (as well as checking if there is already a fix upstream). Good sources for patches are:

* [http://patch-tracker.debian.org/ Debian]
* [http://patches.ubuntu.com/ Ubuntu]
* [http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/ Gentoo]
* [http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/ Fedora] 

= Patch Guidelines =

Experience shows that whilst its clear in your mind why a patch is being added at the time you add a patch, if you revisit it a year later you probably won't remember all the details. For this reason, we ask that patches clearly state some basic information. The full details are available at [[Commit_Patch_Message_Guidelines]].

= Sending Patches Upstream =

OE has many patches which for many reasons would be best submitted to the upstream projects rather than being maintained in OE itself. By doing this the wider community can benefit from the changes, recipe upgrading becomes easier and it also in many cases educates the upstream software projects about how their software gets used and for example, the challenges of a cross compile environment.

== Push'em-weekends ==

These are sprints in the spirit of our [[bug days|bug-squashing weekends]] when we try to 
push our patches to the upstream projects.  The first such sprint was held 
on short notice from Friday, February 15th 2008 to Monday, the 18th.  A few 
patches were already pushed upstream.  Second sprint is scheduled for first weekend in August.

Pushing our bugs upstream is beneficial for us (easier maintainability) and
them (we give back our work).  The following two commands can give you a 
list of patches still in need of being documented in line with above policy.

 find recipes/ \( -name '*.patch' -or -name '*.diff' \) -print0 | xargs -0 egrep -L \^upstream\:

You can push those patches upstream even if you are only a normal user of 
OE. Let us know via the [http://bugs.openembedded.net bug tracker] if you have reported one of our patches
upstream.  Please be sure to test if the patch is still being applied
to the most recent version of the package in OE.

== sample text for upstream reports ==

 Hi,
 
 thank you for sharing your work in $project.  Openembedded.org includes
 recipes to cross-compile $project for a large number of target devices.
 
 I would like to make you aware of some of the changes that we at the 
 openembedded.org project did to the sources you publish.
 
   Patch: http://cgit.openembedded.org/cgit.cgi?url=openembedded/tree/recipes/$project/$patch-url
   Comment: $explanation
 
 You can find all our patches for $project at 
 http://cgit.openembedded.org/cgit.cgi?url=openembedded/tree/recipes/$project/
 
 Thank you again for your work.
 
 Regards
 
 $name

[[Category:Policy]]