Re: [gentoo-dev] Somewhat OT - Making a suggestion for games-emulation/tuxnes

[Alec Warner]

Michael Sullivan wrote:
>
> Anyway, for people like me who have the X flag enabled and might
> accidentally hit the escape key and lose their progress in the game, I
> downloaded the source code of tuxnes-0.75 and commented out all the code
> segments responsible for that ESC/"quit tuxnes" behaviour and I have
> created a patch for each of the files affected (there are three.)  What
> I want to know is, should I submit the three patches in a bug report?  I
> don't have a modified ebuild ready that says, "if the X USE flag is
> enabled, apply the patches" - I don't really know how to safely
> write/edit ebuilds yet.  Do I even submit them to Gentoo's bugzilla, or
> should I paddle upstream with them?  What should I do?
>

In general for something like this, there are a few things to consider.

Is it a Gentoo Specific problem?  If yes then it's usually our bug.
Is it a feature request or a bug?  Sometimes this is a hard distinction
to make.  In this case I'd say feature (but it's debatable)

Either way, is there a patch for it available.  Some maintainers will
take patches because they are useful.  Usually it is a good idea to
submit these patches upstream (gentoo devs hate having patches only in
Gentoo, we don't want to maintain them, so bonus for us if upstream adds
them in the next version = less work for us later).  Some devs will wait
until upstream accepts the patch before putting it in the tree (I
usually do this).

So for a non-gentoo problem upstream is usually the first place to go;
as often as not you can get a yay or nay on a patch from upstream in a
sane amount of time.  If they say yes to it you can then file a bug in
GEntoo and reference your upstream request, asking that we patch the
package until upstream merges it and releases it.
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