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Message-ID: <20111108031242.GU2203@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 03:12:43 +0000
From: Al Viro <viro@...IV.linux.org.uk>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Linux 3.2-rc1
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...
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