If you would like to write bug fixes or improvements for Octave, that is very helpful. When you send your changes, please follow these guidelines to avoid causing extra work for us in studying the patches.
If you don’t follow these guidelines, your information might still be useful, but using it will take extra work. Maintaining Octave is a lot of work in the best of circumstances, and we can’t keep up unless you do your best to help.
If you make two changes for separate reasons, then we might not want to install them both. We might want to install just one.
If you have GNU diff, use ‘diff -cp’, which shows the name of the function that each change occurs in.
Read the ChangeLog file to see what sorts of information to put in, and to learn the style that we use. The purpose of the change log is to show people where to find what was changed. So you need to be specific about what functions you changed; in large functions, it’s often helpful to indicate where within the function the change was made.
On the other hand, once you have shown people where to find the change, you need not explain its purpose. Thus, if you add a new function, all you need to say about it is that it is new. If you feel that the purpose needs explaining, it probably does—but the explanation will be much more useful if you put it in comments in the code.
If you would like your name to appear in the header line for who made the change, send us the header line.