If you have modified a package to expand its functionality or to fix a bug, you should contribute your changes back to the community (some licenses force you to do so, and it is generally considered immoral not to).
Before creating the patch, you must first obtain the latest sources of the package you wish to patch from CVS by running the commands (the package in this example is Foo_Bar):
cvs -d:pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository login password is phpfi cvs -d:pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository co pear/Foo_Bar |
After you have finished adding/changing the code, TEST it: We will not accept code that hasn't been carefully tested. When you are absolutely sure the new code doesn't introduce bugs, create a unified diff by running:
cd pear/Foo_Bar cvs diff -u >Foo_Bar.diff |
Next step is to submit the patch. Send a mail to pear-dev@lists.php.net and Cc the maintainer(s) of the package. The subject of the mail should be prefixed with '[Patch]' to make it clear you are submitting a patch. Also include a verbose explanation of what the patch does. Don't forget to attach the .diff file to the mail. The maintainers of the package are usually listed in the header of each source file. Apart from that their email adresses are available on the package information page on http://pear.php.net/.
Note: If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express, please change the file extension of the diff file to .txt, because Outlook's MIME-Type detection depends on the file extension and attachments with a MIME-Type not equal to text/plain will be rejected by our mailinglist software.
Note: If your patch does break backwards compatibility, the chances are fairly good that the maintainers won't be happy about it. Thus you should always try to fix a bug in a way that does not seriously change the public API. But if there is absolutely no way to keep backwards compatibility and/or if your patch contains a groundbraking improvement, even API changes are fine.