GIMP
News
Docs
Tutorials
More
A patch is exactly what the word says: a small piece of code used to repair a breach. It is normally a plain text file containing only the differences between the current version of the code and the fixed version.
The preferred way of creating a patch is to create it against current git. The ensures that the patches works with the latest edition of the source code and makes it easier for the developers to apply the patch.
Clone the git repository which is
git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp.git
Create commits that fixes the problem. For small problems it will only be a single commit. Be sure to provide your name and email in the commits - you can set up your git repository to do this for you. Please make sure to provide useful commit messages; you may refer to GNOME’s guidelines.
Now that you have commits that fixes the problem, create patches by doing
git format-patch origin/master
This will give you patch files in the form of git commits with names like
0001-plug-ins-Use-string-literal-as-format-in-metadata-p.patch
We prefer to have the patches attached to bug reports in Bugzilla (see below) but it is also fine to send them to the mailing list if they are reasonably small.
If you do not have access to git you can generate the patch against the latest release.
To generate the patch you will need two copies of the source code: one that is unmodified and one containing your changes to the source. Start by downloading the source code of the latest release, extract it and make a copy of the entire source directory. After you have made your changes to one of the source directories and made sure it compiles and works as expected, you can create the patch file using the command:
diff -rup /path/to/unmodified/source /path/to/modified/source > patchfile.patch
To summarize the steps:
make clean to remove files generated during builddiff -rup /path/to/unmodified/source /path/to/modified/source > patchfile.patchThe best way to submit a patch to the GIMP development is to send it to GitLab and inform the rest of the team what the patch is doing:
If you have a patch that is closing bugs then you can attach the patch to the bug/bugs explaining what the patch is doing. You can also inform the gimp-developer mailing list about the closed bug but avoid attaching the patch to the mail sent to the list, instead put the bug links in the mail where the attached patch is located.
Now you just have to wait for the developers and maintainers to look at the patch and see if this is really closing the bug and if it might open new bugs. If everything is fine it will be implemented in a release done soon either stable or development version.
Start a new bug report, mark it as enhancement and put the patch in that report on GitLab. This will give developers a good explanation of why you did the patch and how the patch changes GIMP source or adds new things to it. The only thing you need to add to the report is that it is an enhancement and explain the patch a little bit. A simple way to this is to:
Thats it! You have done a patch reporting enhancement all that is left is for the developers to look at the report and the patch. They might get even better ideas of how to implement this with the help of the patch you sent.