Humble request

[Gerhard Niklasch <nikl@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de>]

Thanks to all who have recently been contributing comments, bug reports
and even fixes (wow!) to PARI-GP version 2.

Having just spent half an hour porting the patches from the mailing list
archive to where patches want to go on the website, let me offer a humble
set of suggestions to all contributors:

(1) It is likely to save others some grief if you diff against the
_latest_ release of PARI-GP.

If for some reason you can't do that, please say _explicitly_ which
version you're diffing against.

(2) It'll save me (and probably Karim) a few minutes' work if you do
all your diffs from the distribution's base directory  (the one with the
version number in its name).  Relative paths beginning with `./' are ok
if `.' is the base dir, although I prefer them without that.  In this way,
each and every diff you find there can be applied by calling `patch -l -p0'
from the base directory  (`-p0' = `remove zero slashes and everything
leading up to them from the path', i.e. use the given path).

If you want to be particularly nice about this, paste in your diff
commandline as well.  (It's a bit redundant but I prefer to see the
options.  Recursive diffs should do this automatically.)

(3) If you follow up on one patch with another affecting the same file
(possibly but not necessarily a modified solution to the same problem),
please state beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the later diff is
to be applied _instead of_ or _on top of_ the former  (or whether they
commute -- this might happen).

(4) Ilya, your diff utility seems to be acting up.  It frequently neglects
to put a newline after the `@@<line numbers>@@' marker, and the first line
of the current chunk then ends up on the same instead of on the following
line of the diff.  Is there anything you could do about this?


Thanks in advance, and best wishes all around.

Gerhard "off to hack some more in src/basemath/arith*.c ..."