Re: being nice to patch(1)

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

On Mon, 2 Jul 2007 14:40:36 -0700 (PDT)
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Mon, 2 Jul 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > 
> > Thing is, changelog-followed-by-diff is a fairly standard format used by
> > quilt and other such toys.
> 
> Sure. And if a tool ends up eating the changelog as a diff, then that tool 
> is broken. I really do think that this is a "patch" bug - I really don't 
> think that that was a valid traditional diff with the four spaces at the 
> head of the line.
> 
> Of course, if the changelog-followed-by-diff doesn't have any indentation 
> or escaping at all, the changelog entry itself *could* actually have a 
> real unified diff in it, and the tool would be unable to tell where the 
> actual patch starts.

erk, yes, sometimes people do like to quote a hunk of diff in the changelog
and yes, hell doth break loose.

> But at least "git show" and friends indent the changelog on purpose, 
> exactly so that there is never any chance that there could be any real 
> ambiguity, and this really was a "patch" bug as far as I can tell. 
> Happily, one that is easy to work around, by just telling patch to always 
> consider the patch a unified diff.

I'm afraid indenting the changelog with leading spaces doesn't help -
patch(1) still tries to apply the diff.

I guess quilt-and-friends could (should) strip away all text prior to the
first ^--- before feeding to patch(1).  That would reliably remove all
git changelog text.