RE: How to submit patches?

[Dave Korn]

On 14 November 2006 14:25, Paul D. Smith wrote:

> On Sunday, 12 November, Dave Korn (address@hidden) wrote:
> 
>>   :)  How about adding functions to upper/lower-case a string?
> 
> In the past I've wanted to leave this for the upcoming Guile integration.
> My goal is to NOT invent YASL in the form of make functions, but rather
> to integrate the GNU standard scripting language into make.

  Ah, that's worth knowing.  Do you have a timescale for that?

> But, it's possible that these are simple enough that we can add them as
> direct functions.

  Well, in favour of doing so is that it's a low-risk and well-maintainable
mechanism, so the only cost really is just a little extra space in the
executable.  And even when make becomes scriptable, it's still nice to provide
some utility functions for end users and not force them to reach for the guile
manual every time they want to do a simple job.

  I was originally contemplating sending patches to make various useful bits
of gmsl functionality built-in functions, which I thought would be nice for
performance reasons.  If you are seriously unwilling to accept patches for new
functions, I won't bother, but if you would be likely to accept similar
patches, I should rename those functions 'uc' and 'lc' to match gmsl before
you apply it.

  I also have a patch to break out the buffer space allocation from
variable_buffer_output separately from the memcpy'ing, so that functions like
these can generate their output directly into the output buffer and do it all
in a single pass over the input and output; this could be generally useful
going forward and some of the existing functions might be able to be ported to
use it and save a redundant memcpy; would you be interested?

  I also see three feature requests in the bugtracker for new functions:

http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?16928
make - Bugs: bug #16928, Request for unique() function
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?13954
make - Bugs: bug #13954, New function requested: $(time)
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?2824
make - Bugs: bug #2824, Add $(vpath) function

  Would you like me to take care of any of those?

    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....