How do you submit patches for inclusion in nethack proper? Just spent five minutes wandering nethack.org, and am still fairly convinced that it's a "source dump"-style project, not something that you can just submit a patch on their reviewboard.

It absolutely is a source dump game, or at least it was the last time I checked (several years ago).

Nethack is often brought up as a jewel of Open Source games, but its development style closely followed closed source methodologies. By comparison, most closed source early access games today have more open and transparent dev cycles than Nethack ever did. That's a side topic, but Open Source game design is a really interesting topic all by itself that I wish more people would talk about.

In any case, source dump models are in a lot of ways even better for downstream forking, because you don't have to regularly integrate new patches in. Whenever a new version of Nethack comes out you'd have to merge in the changes from that version, and then reapply whatever patches you made.

The wonderful thing about Open Source is that your patches don't always need to be included proper. :)

> How do you submit patches for inclusion in nethack proper?

Don't bother. Just join the impatients:

http://nethack4.org/media/nethack4.git [email protected]:tsadok/nethack4.git

Some changes from NH4 trickle back into 3.6.