Re: Ask for help, about the trivial patches.

From: Stefan Richter
Date: Mon Jul 16 2007 - 03:51:31 EST


jimmy bahuleyan wrote:
> TripleX Chung wrote:
>> But I still have problems.
>> Trivial means "of little worth or importance". But some of the examples
>> in the rules are important, like "runtime fixes". Spell fixes must be
>> unimportant, but most of the runtime fixes like memory leaks or NULL
>> pointers must be important. I was still a little confused with them.
>>
>
> Literally, yes. But look at it from a s/w engineering point of view.
>
> A NULL pointer deref is important, but it is also a *very local* and
> very obvious fix (one that doesn't need extensive testing, one that
> doesn't have effects spread out over many modules that requires great
> amount of thought).
>
> So such things are trivial bug-fixes.

Yes; it's more the /handling/ of the patch that is "trivial" in a strict
sense. Bug fixes should usually go through maintainers. But for fixes
which are obvious == easy to verify, trivial@xxxxxxxxxx makes sense as a
central point for submitters to turn to, to lower the barrier for
submission.
--
Stefan Richter
-=====-=-=== -=== =----
http://arcgraph.de/sr/
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