Phase 3 Pushing changes upstream

To get my changes accepted upstream, the first thing I needed to figure out was where in the make / build process to insert my change. Since in the phase 2 optimization testing I only directly edited the Makefile to see the changes.

It turns out ncompress uses a Makefile.def, which contains the definitions to be used for the make call. The package is not built with ./configure like most, but instead, after cloning you can directly make install. This means I had to add the following 2 lines to the Makefile.def:

#Compiler optimization flags
CFLAGS=-O3

I tested whether the package still built correctly with my change to the Makefile.def and it built as it should with the -O3 optimization turned on.

Next I had to figure out how to contribute to the package. Luckily since the package is available on github I can fork the package. So that is what I did, I forked the package, made the change and committed it to my branch. I then created the following pull request:

https://github.com/vapier/ncompress/pull/7

I've added a link to my blog and a short description in the pull request, since there is no other means of communication described on the project page, now all we can do is wait for a response!