Re: rm patch

[Jim Meyering]

Ian Lynagh <address@hidden> wrote:
| On Wed, Feb 07, 2001 at 10:28:36AM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
| > Thanks for the report and patch.
| >
| > However, both standards and historical practice agree that
| > rm should not do as you suggest.
| > I suggest you change your backup script to adjust
| > the permissions, or write a small wrapper script around rm to
| > do what you want.
|
| Hmmmm, I guess I could run chmod -R u+rx first, but this seems less
| efficient and a less nice solution. If I altered the patch to use a
| different command line option then would this be acceptable?

My initial reaction was to say `No'.
But I'm trying to be open minded :-), so here are some
guidelines about adding features to the packages I maintain:
(maybe you can convince enough people that this new feature
is worth adding to GNU rm)

---------------------------------
Here are some guidelines for contributing code to the fileutils,
textutils, and sh-utils packages.

Send patches. (send unified diffs, please -- i.e. diff -u format) If your
changes fix bugs, the bar is quite low in that I don't need much more
than to understand what the original problem was.  However, it helps
a lot if you can give me enough information to reproduce the problem.

On the other hand, if you're adding new features, please follow the
guidelines below:

  - convince me that this is a useful change/addition
      (if you're adding yet another option to ls, the above is pretty hard)

  - convince other people of the same thing
      One way to do that is to post to gnu.bug.utils including as
      much description and justification as you can.  Based on the
      feedback that generates, you may be able to convince me.

Once we agree the change is useful and get around to considering the
actual addition to the code, it helps if you do the following:

  - base your changes on the latest test release -- currently here:
      ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/fetish/

  - follow the guidelines in the GNU Coding Standards (standards.info)
      which is distributed as part of the autoconf package.

  - include changes to the texinfo documentation, and be sure to update
      the --help output.

  - finally, if the change is `significant' you'll have to send signed
      copyright assignment papers to the FSF

And you'll have to be patient and expect delays on my part.
It is unusual that I spend more than a few hours per week
on the packages I maintain.