Re: being nice to patch(1)

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, 2 Jul 2007 14:16:16 -0700 (PDT)
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Mon, 2 Jul 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > 
> > James's current git-scsi-misc has this commit in it:
> > 
> > commit a16efc1cbf0a9e5ea9f99ae98fb774b60d05c35b
> > Author: Kars de Jong <jongk@linux-m68k.org>
> > Date:   Sun Jun 17 14:47:08 2007 +0200
> > 
> > [SCSI] 53c700: Amiga 4000T NCR53c710 SCSI
> >     
> >     New driver for the Amiga 4000T built-in NCR53c710 SCSI controller, using the
> >     53c700 SCSI core.
> >     
> >     Signed-off-by: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
> >     Signed-off-by: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@SteelEye.com>
> > 
> > 
> > When one pulls that diff out of git with `git-show' or whatever, it doesn't
> > work - patch(1) has a heart attack over the "53c700":
> 
> There's really nothing git can do about this, this is a patch oddity about 
> the free-form message. A really strange one too, because the line is 
> literally four spaces followed by the 53c700, and the thing is, that's not 
> even a valid olf-fashioned patch (_without_ the four spaces, I could see 
> that "patch" might think that it's a really old ed-
> 
> I think you have two options:
> 
>  - tell patch to take it as a unified diff:
> 
> 	git show | patch -p1 -u
> 
>    should work, since patch won't be trying to figure out what kind of 
>    diff it is, and won't think that the 53c700 is some kind of odd ed 
>    script.

yup, `patch -u' fixes it up.

>  - suppress the free-form messages, by using (for example)
> 
> 	git show --pretty=oneline | patch -p1
> 
>    and now "patch" doesn't get any random commit message except for the 
>    first line (which always starts with the SHA1) and hopefully cannot 
>    _possibly_ interpret that to be some strange patch format.
> 
> Or, of course, just use "git-apply" instead of patch to apply the thing.
> 

Thing is, changelog-followed-by-diff is a fairly standard format used by
quilt and other such toys.

Hopefully quilt is using -u so it won't encounter this oddity.