=head1 NAME

PATCHES - track and distribute your code changes

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This page documents how to distribute your changes to GNU LilyPond

=head1 ABSTRACT

Distributing a change normally goes like this:

=over 5

=item *

make your fix/add your code 

=item *

Add changes to NEWS, and add yourself to Documentation/AUTHORS.pod

=item *

generate a patch, 

=item *

e-mail your patch to one of the mailing lists
gnu-music-discuss@gnu.org or bug-gnu-music@gnu.org


=back

=head1 GENERATING A PATCH

In F<VERSION>, set TOPLEVEL_MY_PATCH_LEVEL:

    VERSION:
	...
	TOPLEVEL_MY_PATCH_LEVEL = jcn1

In F<NEWS>, enter a summary of changes:

    NEWS:
	pl 0.1.48.jcn1
		- added PATCHES.pod

Then, from the top of Lily's source tree, type

    make-patch

which leaves your patch as F<./patch-0.1.48.jcn1>.

If you didn't configure Lily using --srcdir, you can do:

    release

    tar-ball: ../patches/patch-0.1.48.jcn1.gz
    patch: ../patches/patch-0.1.48.jcn1.gz
    updeet: ../test/updeet

=head1 PREREQUISITES

For creating a patch you need

=over 5

=item *

All items mentioned in F<INSTALL>.  You're not going to send a patch
that you haven't even built, right?

=item *

GNU Diff

=item *

Python (version 1.4 or newer).  
You can of course make a patch by hand, which would go something like:

    make distclean
    cd ..
    diff -urN lilypond-0.1.48 lilypond-0.1.48.jcn1 > patch-0.1.48.jcn1

but there are handy python scripts available.  If you're doing development,
you'll need Python for other LilyPond scripts anyway.

=item *

The Lily directory structure, which looks like:

    lilypond-0.1.48/
    patches/
    releases/
    test/

=back
	
=head1 APPLYING PATCHES

If you're following LilyPond development regularly, you probably want to
download just the patch for each subsequent release.
After downloading the patch (into the patches directory, of course), simply 
apply it:

    gzip -dc ../patches/patch-0.1.49.gz | patch -p1 -E

and don't forget to make automatically generated files:

    autoconf 1)
    configure

=head1 SYNCHRONISE

If you're not very quick with sending your patch, there's a good chance
that an new release of LilyPond comes available.  In such a case (and
sometimes for other unkown reasons :-), the maintainer will probably ask
you to make a new patch against the latest release.
Your best bet is to download the latest release, and apply your patch
against this new source tree:

    cd lilypond-0.1.49
    gzip -dc ../patches/patch-0.1.48.jcn1.gz | patch -p1 -E
    autoconf 1)
    configure

Then, make a patch as shown above.

1) patches don't include automatically generated files, i.e. F<configure>
   and files generated by F<configure>.

=head1 MAINTAINER

Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@cs.uu.nl>

Just keep on sending those patches!