Documentation cleanup questions

[Rik]

3/15/09

All,

I want to help contribute back to Octave by reviewing and cleaning up
the documentation.  To be most useful, however, I need a little guidance
on the practical side.

First, I really like bug trackers and I note that there is a
quasi-unofficial shift towards using one:
http://www.nabble.com/Using-the-Savannah-tracker-td22199236.html.  I am
willing to be a guinea pig and file my patches against the Savannah
tracker and see what happens. 

My first question is how fine-grained do you want the patches for
documentation to be?  Ordinarily, I understand trying to have one patch
do a single thing but if I modify the Texinfo for a single .m file and
report that as a bug then the overhead will be enormous.  I estimate it
would probably take 2 minutes to file a bug which means 1 hour to open
bugs on 30 files.  Then there would be the time on your side to apply
each patch and close the bug which would probably also average 2
minutes.  My proposal is to do all the documentation changes for a
directory, such as signal or sparse, and submit one bug and changeset
for the entire directory.  Any guidance on how to set the slider between
1 patch/1 problem and 1 patch/all_found_problems?

The second question is the format of the patches.  According to the web
pages 'diff -c' is preferred but I have downloaded Mercurial and could
easily use 'hg export' to create patches that might be easier to apply. 
Which format, context diff or Mercurial export, would you prefer?

Cheers,
Rik