http://townx.org/blog/elliot/drupal_patches Comments for "Drupal patches" en http://townx.org/blog/elliot/drupal_patches <p>Last night I spent some time pulling out the changes I've made to my Drupal install (i.e. this website) and turning them into patches. So far, I've submitted <a href="http://drupal.org/project/issues/?states=1,2,8,3,4,5,6,7&amp;users=19664">four patches</a> to the Drupal issue tracker. One was rejected on the grounds that something similar was already in CVS, and a second because it was too picky (I can't abide error messages if they are avoidable, and all my patch did was fix a trivial error which didn't affect how Drupal runs). The other two are still in the queue, so they might make it in yet.</p> <p>Aside from anything else, I've learned two important lessons about attempting to contribute to Drupal (which are possibly true of trying to contribute to any open source project):</p> <ol> <li>Developers are extremely particular about coding standards. In two of my four patches, I slightly diverged from the coding standard for brevity's sake, and the patch reviewers were critical of this in both cases.</li> <li>To develop on a project, you really need to be using the bleeding edge source code from CVS. One of my patches was rejected because similar functionality had made it into the source tree since I downloaded it.</li> </ol> <p>My motivation for submitting patches is so I don't have to maintain my patched versions. I always encourage people who modify open source software to try to get their changes incorporated into the main source tree, rather than maintain a fork themselves. But, on this occasion, because I am quite picky, I may find myself in the position of maintaining my own fork of Drupal so I can keep the features I've added which I find useful.</p> http://townx.org/blog/elliot/drupal_patches#comments Tue, 15 Mar 2005 13:40:00 -0600 elliot 89 at http://townx.org