[ODE] ODE Patches

[J. Perkins]

In an attempt to make myself useful around here, I have sorted through
the list archives back to April 2004 (when Russ was still active in
the project), and copied all of the patches that I could find into the
SourceForge patch manager at:

   http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=24884&atid=382801

I will continue to monitor the list and add any new patches that come
across to the manager.

The next step is to sort through the existing patches and determine
which ones have already been applied or rejected. For this, and for
future patches, it would be nice to have categories like "Unverified",
"Applied to Unstable", etc. If someone could give me the appropriate
rights to the SourceForge project I will take care of setting this up.

If people could take a few minutes and review the list I would really
appreciate it. If you know that a patch has already been applied, or
know why a particular patch was rejected, a quick note to that effect
would really speed things up. Also, and perhaps most important of all:
if you have tried any of these patches *please* report back on how
they work. We'll never get any of them applied if people don't provide
feedback.

Once the list has been sorted out I will try to pull any additional
context I can out of the list archives, prioritize them, and then nag
everyone until they get applied or rejected. Hopefully this helps
*someone*.

The next thing to do, which should greatly speed up the acceptance of
patches, is to build a suite of unit tests. I've done a fair amount
with NUnit but have no experience with C++ unit testing. I would be
willing to submit some tests for the functions I commonly use if
someone would put together a test harness, using whatever system they
are familiar with (anything is better than nothing!)

If anyone can jump in and help it would most appeciated:

* review the list of patches in the SourceForge patch manager
* write guides for creating, submitting, and applying patches on the wiki
* add a unit testing framework to CVS
* write unit tests

Feedback welcomed and encouraged,

Jason