Just posted my patch into Ant. You can see it here.
Turns out that posting a patch (the svn diff thing) was highly recommended, as when I was submitting it they asked whether or not the attachment was a patch. If not, they would then autodetect the file and try to figure it out from there. I know that I would pay less attention to a non-patch patch, and sympathize with the poor core members who have to deal with all this stuff.
Speaking of core members, upon successful submission I was given the message:
Email sent to:
notifications-@ant.apache.org, nils-@meiers.net, mccartney-@mayaviz.com, eric-@timebytes.com, jakob.voss-@gbv.de
Excluding:
no one
This probably means that I’ll be hearing from one of them soon. Our Professor said that when a patch is submitted there is usually a back and forth conversation, almost a negotiation, which occurs between the reviewers (core) and the submitter (periphery)(me). The original post can be found here: https://anterence.blogspot.com/2010/06/patch-posted.html