Patch version gotchas (was Re: i think the list of "required software" needs to be clarified)

[Tim Bird <tim.bird@am.sony.com>]

On 04/09/2013 06:10 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> SANITY_REQUIRED_UTILITIES ?= "patch diffstat makeinfo git bzip2 tar
> gzip gawk chrpath wget cpio"

This is just a generic warning on the subject of native patch.
We recently had a discussion on the LTSI-dev mailing list about
patch.  It seems that some patches produced by git now require
a later version of patch than was shipped in relatively recent
platforms(e.g. Ubuntu 12.04 shipped with patch 2.6.1)

Based on this, at Sony we intended to switch over to patch 2.7
(which has explicit support for "diff --git" format)
Unfortunately, we found that some of our patches were not compatible
with this version of patch, and thus found ourselves in
a pickle.  We now have to switch between patch versions, depending
on the project and set of patches we're working on.

=============================
Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Workgroup of the Linux Foundation
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Network Entertainment
=============================