Is it enforced somewhere that only the maintainer is allowed to commit patches for his library? Not enforced, but seen as good manners. Would you like it if someone would, say, while you're cooking, constantly reach in and do minor tasks for you, unasked? I would be annoyed, because even with minor tasks,
Jens Seidel wrote: there's a chance of something going wrong. Also, there's the problem of noticing. If you submit a ticket (it's called ticket because that's what the system calls it) for library XYZ, then only the maintainer of XYZ is really aware of it. Other people have better things to do than go through patches for libraries other than their own looking for patches trivial enough that they can apply them. Also, GCC 4.3 is, at the moment, still a fuzzy target. Things can change. That doesn't apply to the example patch, of course (although I had to check the standard to realize that a lonely semicolon really isn't allowed on the global level), but in general, people will be wary when confronted with fixes for an experimental compiler. Sebastian Redl