HowToBuildingPatches
Patches
Submitting patches (or diffs) is the usual way of contributing code to DragonFly BSD. All submissions to the project should go to the submit "mailing lists" (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/main/forums.cgi). When you submit a patch please include a description of what has been changed. Making patches when you only have a copy of the source:
Let's say you just installed DragonFly BSD and you notice a problem in /bin/cat. Since you have /usr/src sync'ed with the main CVS repository. You go into /usr/src/bin/cat and make your modifications. But now what? Well here is what you can do. But next time try the procdure in the next section. 
- Copy your version of cat into /usr/src/bin/cat.local
- Run cvsup to resync your source tree back to a clean state.
Then run diff -ru cat cat.local and submit a patch to the mailing list (with a short description on what you did)
root# cp -r /usr/src/bin/cat /usr/src/bin/cat.local root# cd /usr/src/bin root# diff -ru cat cat.local > usr.bin.cat.patch
Making patches when you have a copy of the repository
Step 1: Get a copy of the CVS repository Step 2: Check out a copy of the source from that CVS repository Step 3: Edit the code Step 4: Generate a patch with cvs diff
Using cvsps
I use cvsps 1.3.3 to monitor and extract patchsets from the FreeBSD CVS repository. This utility can be found in /usr/pkgsrc/devel/cvsps.
Get a copy of both the FreeBSD and DragonFly cvs repositories.
I use cvsup and the following two files to obtain a partial copy of the two projects (DragonFly and FreeBSD).
% cat dfly-supfile
*default host=cvsup.dragonflybsd.org
*default base=/usr/home/okumoto/Work/make
*default prefix=/usr/home/okumoto/Work/make/dfly-cvs
*default release=cvs
*default delete use-rel-suffix
*default compress
cvs-src
% cat fbsd-supfile
#*default host=cvsup14.us.FreeBSD.org
*default host=cvsup4.us.FreeBSD.org *default base=/usr/home/okumoto/Work/make *default prefix=/usr/home/okumoto/Work/make/fbsd-cvs *default release=cvs *default delete use-rel-suffix
src-usrbin
Execute the following commands:
% cd /usr/home/okumoto/Work/make
% mkdir fbsd-cvs
% cvsup fbsd-supfile -c fbsd-sup -i src/usr.bin/make
% mkdir dfly-cvs
% cvsup dfly-supfile -c dfly-sup -i src/usr.bin/make
This should result in two small cvs repositories that only contain source for usr.bin/make, and which will update quickly.
Create working directories by checking out the utility you want to work on.
The cvs program wants to have a CVSROOT directory so we just create an empty directory. You can use the -R option to cvs, but that prevents you from making your own tags, or checking in stuff into your local repository copy.
% mkdir -p fbsd-cvs/src/usr.bin/CVSROOT
% mkdir -p fbsd-src
% (cd fbsd-src; cvs -d ${PWD}/fbsd-cvs/src/usr.bin co make)
% mkdir -p dfly-cvs/src/usr.bin/CVSROOT
% mkdir -p dfly-src
% (cd dfly-src; cvs -d ${PWD}/dfly-cvs/src/usr.bin co make)
This should result in a check out of the most current version of make from each project. Use cvsps to extract a change log from the cvs working directory
Using cvsps you can extract a patch history.
% cd dfly-src/make
% cvsps | less
From change log history extract a patch.
% cvsps -s 49-50 > patch-XXX
Submit patch