Chapter 11. Submitting a patch to the project

Abstract

How to submit a patch to the project (assumes you do not have a CVS account).

Since ReactOS does not have a definite maintainer for each section of the code, you should mail ros-kernel and ask for someone to accept the patch.

Thoroughly check that your change works as intended.
Test your changes with the latest code from CVS. Something may have changed in the latest code that either breaks your change or causes your change to break something else.
Make sure that ReactOS can still boot and that any applications or systems that may be affected by your change still run properly.

Make sure that your patch is against the latest code from CVS.
Where you have made changes to an existing source file, you will use diff to obtain a file that contains only the changes that you have made:
- Make sure you have cvs and diff on your system (cvs.exe and diff.exe on Windows). If you use Windows and don't have these tools, you can obtain WinCVS from http://www.wincvs.org/ (remember to put the WinCVS directory in your path).
- To create the patch:
```
cvs diff -up file1 file2 > mypatch.diff
```
- If you have changed many files, then you can avoid typing each filename by doing this:
```
cd <top-directory-for-all-changed-files>cvs diff -up > mypatch.diff
```
Zip all new files and diffs to existing files and send them to the person that will commit the changes to CVS.