Hi! On Mon, 2026-03-16 at 13:03:11 +0100, Guillem Jover wrote: > This seems to be an artificial limitation in dgit. dpkg-source (via > GNU patch) is capable of applying such changes, as long as they are > in git patch format. Although it cannot produce them (currently) > because GNU diff does not support generating git formatted patches. > > This seems like a common misconception (even among dgit developers(?) > and users, or at least has been in the past), but perhaps the dgit > error and that GNU diff issue (and by extension «dpkg-source --commit») > does not help matters, or the dpkg-source documentation is lacking. > Will look into whether the latter can be improved.
Well, I guess we could opportunistically make dpkg-source use «git diff --no-index» over the two upstream pathnames (with no git repos) if git is available, and fail otherwise in case of unrepresentable diffs using GNU diff, with a hint to install git. It should not be worse than the current situation at least. :) I think I've not implemented this in the past, out of concern of creating different behavior depending on the tools available, or to avoid a hard-dependency on git in the build-essential set. But given that the user will be getting an error anyway, that does not look that bad, thinking about it now. I'll look into implementing this as well. > (As an example, I'm attaching a couple of patches and series file, to > be placed on top of pci.ids to demonstrate this.) Thanks, Guillem
