Providing a patch to the trunk/branch

[bruedge]

Motivated by this thread: http://www.jfree.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=116844 I checked out the 1.0.X version of JFreeChart and started to make some code changes to use this in our software.
To follow the LGPL, if I understood correctly, I have to (and I'd like to) release these changes. Is providing a patch sufficient for that? Our software is commercial.
I took a look at the patch overview page: http://sourceforge.net/p/jfreechart/patches/. What confused me was that I could not find out to which repository these patches are supposed to be applied. Or is that decided by the admins? Where do I indicate for which version/repository of JFreeChart my patch is supposed to be applied?
When I want to provide a patch in the future, which way should I go? Can I just upload it to the aforementioned page, should I post a thread here first? Should I use the patches mailing list first? I found pages that explain patches (like http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/j ... nd_patches) but I'm still not sure where I would start as soon as I'm ready to provide my changes as a patch. This is the first time I am working with such an environment (only learned about patches yesterday) so please bear with me.

Best regards,
Daniel

[david.gilbert]

Hi Daniel,

This is the SVN branch that we are using for the 1.0.x releases:

http://sourceforge.net/p/jfreechart/cod ... .x-branch/

Patches against this branch should maintain backwards compatibility (you can add new classes, interfaces and methods to the API, but the existing ones should not be changed).

If you want to add a new feature and can't maintain the existing API, then you could look at JFreeChart-FSE at GitHub. This will become JFreeChart 2.0 eventually (no releases have been made from this repo yet, but that may happen in the next month or two):

https://github.com/jfree/jfreechart-fse

The JFreeChart API will change with this release, so you have more flexibility to change things.

[Naxter]

Hey,

I have the same issue as Daniel. I changed the variable "panMask" in ChartPanel to "protected", that allows me to change the mouse Events.
Do I have to "patch" this? And where do I have to put the patch?

Greetings

[david.gilbert]

Hi,

Note that you are not obligated to provide patches back to the JFreeChart project, although it's always good to receive them. The obligation in the LGPL is to provide sources (including modifications) to the people that *you* distribute JFreeChart to.

For the change you made to panMask in the ChartPanel class, would it be sufficient to have getter/setter methods? I could make that change for the next release.

[Naxter]

Okay thank you for your reply.

That would be absolutly sufficient in my eyes, I would appreciate your change for the next release.

Greetings,

Tobi