Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 8 Nov 2011 03:12:43 +0000 | From | Al Viro <> | Subject | Re: Linux 3.2-rc1 |
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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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