On 06/02/2015 10:24 AM, Arthur Schwarz wrote:
> A coupla' issues. I don't know Texinfo. I have included an extensive
> revision of the TAP testing cycle as a pdf file, downloaded from an Open
> Office Document.

While that may work, it is tedious to maintainers.  We have to figure
out which text you added or removed, then find the same text in the
upstream texinfo file and make the same edits.  And being a pdf, it may
be hard to copy and paste the changed text, making it all that harder.
You might make it easier by using color highlights or strikethrough
notations to call attention to your edits, but it is still not as
trivial as just having those edits already made in patch form against
the original upstream texinfo file.

If you want your patches to go in, it really WILL be better for you to
figure out how to directly patch the texinfo file.  It's not that hard
to figure out - it is a plain text representation with fairly obvious
markup for the most common tasks.  And we are more than willing to help
you with markup questions or with proof-reading, if we can start from a
patch that gets us 90% of the way to a final version without having to
do lots of copy-and-paste gyrations.  But if you just dump a .pdf file
of "here's the final product" without actually patching the upstream
source file, it will probably just be ignored, because in that case,
you'd have done only 10% of the work instead of 90%.  Like it or not,
free software works on a meritocracy principle, where the patches that
get applied are the ones written by people persistent enough to make the
maintainer's life easy.

For comparison, we prefer that someone says: "here are the changes to
your .c file to fix a bug", rather than "here is a complete .c file that
includes bug fixes but you have to locate what changed" or even "here is
a new binary that was compiled from a fixed .c file, but you have to
reverse engineer the binary to figure out what the changes were".

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org