Re: [PATCH] [RFC] adding support for .patches and /proc/patches.gz

[viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk]

On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 11:37:34AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Jon Oberheide <jon@focalhost.com> writes:
> 
> > I'm CC'ing this to the GNU patch maintainers.  Hopefully they will have
> > some input.
> 
> As I understand it, Solution 4 is an incompatible change to 'patch'
> which would cause 'patch' to not conform to POSIX, the LSB, or to
> widespread existing practice.  That's a pretty serious step, and I'm
> not sure it's worth the aggravation.
> 
> Solution 3 would be to add an option to 'patch' to cause it to log the
> patches into a file.  The basic idea seems like a worthwhile
> improvement to 'patch', though (as you mention) it's more of a hassle
> for users to remember the option.
> 
> Perhaps there's a better way to address the problem in a way that
> maintains compatibility while still satisfying your needs.  For example,
> if the kernel patches all contained a line like this at the start:
> 
> Patch-log: .patches
> 
> then 'patch' could log all the changes into the named file.  This
> would conform to POSIX.

Not needed.

diff -erN dir1/file dir2/file
--- dir1/file
+++ dir2/file
1i
lines
.

will do just fine.  Remember that patch(1) can handle at least some ed
scripts.