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Somewhat OT - Making a suggestion for games-emulation/tuxnes
I hope this is the right place for this, or at least the right place to
start. Feel free to flame me if it's not. This question relates to
submitting a patch for a Gentoo package. I was running tuxnes-0.75
today. I was playing Final Fantasy 3, which is AFAIK not yet released
in the USA (and also AFAIK there are no plans to do so in the future.)
I have a ROM of it translated from Japanese that I downloaded years ago.
Anyway, I was unfamiliar with interface controls in tuxnes (still used
to nesticle, I guess), so when I wanted to exit the menu in teh game, I
hit the escape key out of habit (I don't know why I did this - I guess
it's because in the little games I write myself escape closes the menu.
In nesticle, hitting escape just makes the nesticle menu bar visible.).
Anyway, this not only closed the menu, but tuxnes as well, losing my
progress in the game. Needless to say I was unhappy with this, as I
didn't go to the menu until after fighting the Land Turtle - the first
boss battle of the game. There wasn't a reason to go to the menu before
then.

At first I didn't understand why the escape key would exit the emulator
- I have the X use flag enabled, so I have a title bar, control box, and
the minimize, maximize and close buttons across the top, so if I wanted
to close the emulator I'd just hit the X button in the corner, but I
guess people who didn't have the X flag enabled would need the escape
key exit.

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?

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Re: Somewhat OT - Making a suggestion for games-emulation/tuxnes [ In reply to ]
Michael Sullivan wrote:
> I hope this is the right place for this, or at least the right place to

No, not really.

> write/edit ebuilds yet. Do I even submit them to Gentoo's bugzilla, or
> should I paddle upstream with them? What should I do?

This isn't a bug so much as a behavior that you just don't like. Take it up with
upstream.

--
Andrew Gaffney http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/
Gentoo Linux Developer Installer Project
Today's lesson in political correctness: "Go asphyxiate on a phallus"
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Re: Somewhat OT - Making a suggestion for games-emulation/tuxnes [ In reply to ]
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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Re: Somewhat OT - Making a suggestion for games-emulation/tuxnes [ In reply to ]
Well done for making the patch, and there's nothing at all wrong in asking
IMO. Not sure if we needed the whole story ;) but that's minor.

Besides what Alec Warner said, you should also try adding the patch to the
ebuild in a local overlay. Please find out elsewhere in gentoo how to do
this. (forums, irc etc) There's a _small_ amount of info about patching in
my post here http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-529919.html

Good luck!

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