http://invisible-island.net/
Copyright © 2001-2022,2026 by Thomas E. Dickey

Synopsis

This is a collection of some of the patches which I have made to GNU programs. I have submitted these patches to the appropriate maintainers, but received no acknowledgment. That is, they were ignored. In a few other cases, I have seen my changes incorporated without credit, but that is another matter. The former (nonexistent or non-responsive maintainers) are preferable to the latter (egotistical plagiarists). Here's a quote from one of the latter's (not a GNU maintainer) build instructions:

Once again, there should be no errors.
You'll get lots of warnings, just ignore them.

Programs

DIFFUTILS

20010303 A patch which I used to build diffutils with Visual C++. Besides the essential changes for the port, there are a number of corrections to the code (mismatches with types, nonstandardisms, etc.).

FINDUTILS

19990508 A fix for sign-extension which caused a core dump in locate when there was too great a change in lengths between "adjacent" directory names.

20010227 A patch which I used to build diffutils with Visual C++. Note that pathnames are emitted with forward slashes, and the -exec option does not work.

FLEX

Flex of course is not a part of the GNU project. It is distributed under a modified BSD license. However, many people continue to assume it is GNU software; this page is a convenient place to document this patch (until I add an analogous page for other patches).

20051223

This patch allows me to build vile with that version of flex by repairing some of the damage done by the "new" flex's moving some of its namespace into m4 macros.

Flex, as you note here is not a GNU program.

So-called "new" flex is an orphaned project here. which has been packaged in Debian/unstable since 2003. The Debian package maintainer has been attempting to breath life into it ever since, although its developers have abandoned it. For practical purposes, he is the program's maintainer, but does not have a good grasp of its design. Consequently, development (other than build-fixes) has stopped.

More interesting, however, is the notion of making flex depend upon m4. That detracts from its portability (read the code and think about it). The immediate problem addressed by this patch is that by making m4-macros of flex's output, it makes the -P option rename the yytext and yyleng variables, rather than provide both the names. That makes it not comply with POSIX (some mailing list discussion noted via google a while back hinted that the developers needed some help there).

GLIBC

20010323

A patch for recent glibc (2.x) which addresses the compiler warnings from the nonstandard use of pointer arithmetic in

/usr/include/bits/string2.h

GREP

20010227 A patch which I used to build grep with Visual C++.

PATCH

20010523 A patch which I used to build patch with Visual C++ and Borland C:

• Modify to make this work with win32 compilers (Visual C++ and Borland C), by adding module raf.c which sidesteps the non-POSIX use of fseek and ftell to address the patch file by characters.

• Make PARAMS() macro consistently defined/used across modules, to allow this to compile with Borland C. (2.5.4's note about converting C sources to ANSI prototypes is misleading).

• Make redefinition of const within some C files only happen if the config.h header is not used.

• Fix broken ifdef's for stdarg/varargs in error.c, adding intermediate symbol USE_STDARG which is defined consistently with PARAMS() macro.

• Fix several compiler warnings, including most of those where a pointer value was treated as a boolean (not portable because an int is not necessarily as big as a pointer), highlighting a logic error in the use of the 'invc' variable.

See Also

• I've submitted fixes for screen more than once. That was finally resolved with a new maintainer:

  • Handle the '2' code for OSC.

  • Add a note about a fixed bug in ncurses.

  • Set both Xterm title and icon name.

  He also accepted fixes to allow screen to work with the new title control-sequences which I added to xterm in patch #251, in November 2009.

• see also my version of autoconf.

• I continue to work on flex, distributed as reflex.

• I also have improved indent, distributed as cindent.

Afterthoughts

Although my changes were accepted (and acknowledged) for screen that was not the end of the story. It continues.

In my patches, I did not alter the manual page. Chowdhury added my name to the list of contributors in the ChangeLog file (which is sorted by surname), but likewise did not alter the manual page.

The manual page has a summary of the escape sequences recognized by screen, as well as a list of contributors (which had not been updated for several years).

In 2016, Eric Raymond spent an hour or two (no more than an afternoon's work) improving the format of the documentation. In the resulting commit, he added his name to the top of the list of contributors, ignoring the list of contributors in the ChangeLog file. This was one of his 2 commits (collaborating with Alexander Naumov), one of 1324 commits in the Git log. The other commit was for errata in the manpage. That shared commit amounts to half of the changed lines in Naumov's commits.

The preferred order of the list of contributors is not apparent, except by inspecting old versions of screen. In those versions, new entries were added at the end. Putting his name first makes it more noticeable, and hints that it is more important. In that commit, by ignoring the other contributors, Raymond skipped over about ten years of development.

Since that point, there also are many contributors whose names can be found in the Git history. Beginning with Raymond's commit, newer contributors are put at the top of the list. In screen 4.9, there are seven. Of those seven, four (including Raymond) are not credited in the Git log with any change to the program, and one provided only a trivial build-fix. With screen 5.0 there are two more contributors. Checking the commit, it cites as contributors a couple of people who helped to test the program.

I noticed this in February 2026 while updating the terminal descriptions in ncurses. There was a bug report in Debian which mentioned a feature (the erase-character sequence) in the manual page. I reviewed the entire list (finding a few errors and omissions in the manual page), and saw the list of contributors near the end, while looking for the section describing the escape sequences.

Here is a table showing the developers and contributors as of February 2026. Except for the ones listed as “authors” (shown in bold font) none of the other contributors in the ChangeLog file are listed in the manual page. There are also several contributors who are not credited in the manual page.

Copyright

Copyright © 2001-2022,2026 by Thomas E. Dickey
All Rights Reserved.

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of the above listed copyright holder(s) not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission.

THE ABOVE LISTED COPYRIGHT HOLDER(S) DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE, INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS, IN NO EVENT SHALL THE ABOVE LISTED COPYRIGHT HOLDER(S) BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.