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

[Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU>]

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.