Day Fourteen: Submitting a Patch to XBMC

Several members of my group struggled with Personal Package Archives (PPA) when compiling XBMC from source. The process is relatively simple once you discover the command format and find the PPA that you need  (I went through these steps for XBMC in an earlier post), but we felt that this information should be present in the readme file. The readme sends you here to a broken link for support documentation on adding a PPA to your system. The readme also links to the recommended PPA for XBMC (development version) here, but it does not provide the command for adding this PPA to the apt-repository, even though this readme is specifically for Ubuntu.

For our first bug-fix, we decided to update this documentation to reflect more accurate information and also to make it easier for future users. XBMC has a wiki page that describes the process of submitting a patch in great detail; however, it does not really mention standards for documentation. The changes to the readme file and running the "diff -u" command were fairly simple tasks. The difficult part was working up the courage to actually submit the file. We double-checked everything and then double-checked it again. The whole process was definitely more nerve wracking than it needed to be, but none of us had ever submitted a patch to an open source community before. 

The ticket can be found here. It seems like we have already received some comments from the developers. I hope everything goes well *crosses fingers*.