Donate Your Changes

After making your modifications to the source code, compose a clear and concise log message to describe those changes and the reasons for them. Then, send an email to the developers list containing your log message and the output of svn diff (from the top of your Subversion working copy). If the community members consider your changes acceptable, someone who has commit privileges (permission to make new revisions in the Subversion source repository) will add your changes to the public source code tree. Recall that permission to directly commit changes to the repository is granted on merit—if you demonstrate comprehension of Subversion, programming competency, and a «team spirit», you will likely be awarded that permission.

[51] Note that the URL checked out in the example above ends not with svn, but with a subdirectory thereof called trunk. See our discussion of Subversion's branching and tagging model for the reasoning behind this.

[52] While this may superficially appear as some sort of elitism, this «earn your commit privileges» notion is about efficiency—whether it costs more in time and effort to review and apply someone else's changes that are likely to be safe and useful, versus the potential costs of undoing changes that are dangerous.

[53] You might want to grab some popcorn. «Thorough», in this instance, translates to somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty minutes of non-interactive machine churn.