Re: Re: being nice to patch(1)

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

On Tue, 3 Jul 2007 15:34:46 +0200 Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de> wrote:

> On Tuesday 03 July 2007 02:28, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > So I would suggest that in quilt and other systems, you either:
> >
> >  - strip all headers manually
> >
> >  - forget about "patch", and use "git-apply" instead that does things
> >    right and doesn't screw up like this (and can do rename diffs etc too).
> >
> > I guess the second choice generally isn't an option, but dammit,
> > "git-apply" really is the better program here.
> 
> I'm in bit of a conflict with choice one: when applying patches in an 
> automated build process or similar, the likely way to do so is a simple loop 
> over the series file. So the less magic when applying patches with quilt, the 
> better.
> 
> Turning off the insane heuristic with patch -u will do well enough I hope. 
> Quilt does not use that option by default because it also supports context 
> diffs (some people / projects prefer them), but that can easily be customized 
> in .quiltrc:
> 
>     QUILT_PATCH_OPTS=-u
> 

I guess one could try `patch -p1' and if that failed, `patch -p1 -u'.

But the problem is that patch will get stuck in interactive mode prompting
for a filename.  I've never actually worked how to make patch(1) just fail
rather than going interactive, not that I've tried terribly hard.  Any
hints there?

Thanks.