Re: Linux 3.2-rc1

[Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>]

On Mon, Nov 07, 2011 at 06:10:02PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Which brings me to a question I already asked on G+ - do people really
> need the old-fashioned patches? The -rc1 patch is about 22MB gzip-9'd,
> and part of the reason is that all those renames cause big
> delete/create diffs. We *could* use git rename patches, but then you'd
> have to apply them with "git apply" rather than the legacy "patch"
> executables. But as it is, the patch is almost a third of the size of
> the tar-ball, which makes me wonder if there's even any point to such
> a big patch?

FWIW, agruen seems to be doing patch(1) development these days; the last
snapshot has this in NEWS:

* Support for most features of the "diff --git" format: renames and copies,
  permission changes, symlink diffs.  Caveats:
  + Binary diffs are not supported yet; patch will complain and skip them.
  + In the "diff --git" format, all the patches are relative to the original
    state of the files to patch, allowing things like criss-cross renames.
    GNU patch will currently fail for such patches.
* Support for double-quoted filenames in the "diff --git" format: when a
  filename in a context diff starts with a double quote, it is interpreted
  as a C string literal.  The escape sequences \\, \", \a, \b, \f, \n, \r,
  \t, \v, and \ooo (a three-digit octal number between 0 and 255) are
  recognized.

Hell knows how long until they release it and distros pick the result, of
course.  Their git tree on git://git.savannah.gnu.org/patch.git is fairly
quiet; there had been a bunch of local fixes since the last snapshot (this
April) but not much else...