On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 12:50:09PM -0800, Andy Ross wrote:
> Curtis L. Olson wrote:
> > Martin Dressler writes:
> > > I'm now working on Ground view mode and I just go through code to
> > > fully understand the problem. I find some small nearly cosmetic
> > > bugs.  What is the best way to rapair them. Should I make diff of
> > > affected code or should I tar the whole file. Should I repair only
> > > one bug in one patch. Or could I make all changes and tar them in
> > > one patch.
> >
> > It's easiest for me if you send whole copies of the files that are
> > fixed/changed.
> 
> Clearly this is an issue of personal style, but let me rattle off a
> few reasons why I think patch files are a better choice:
> 
> + They're more tolerant of file change.  Consider my patch for the
>   sorted property list.  David just applied it, but only after other
>   modifications to the same file.  Doing this with a whole file is a
>   merge chore, but the patch still applied cleanly.  There was a
>   feature collision recently (I forget the details) where changes got
>   backed out accidentally.  This is much harder to do when all the
>   changes are stored and transferred as patch files.

That may be true.

> 
> + They're more human readable.  Inevitably, you're going to be doing a
>   diff between revisions to see what's changed anyway.  This just give
>   it to you up front.  If you want to look at more surrounding code,
>   you certainly can, but everyone starts with the diff anyway.

Hardly. A side by side diff program such as gtkdiff or xxdiff (no doubt
emacs has such a feature as well) is human readable. You have obviously
taken the time to learn how to read a patch and become comfortable with
it, but I can't imagine they were ever *meant* to be human readable.



> 
> + They're smaller, and much more appropriate for posting to the
>   mailing lists.  This means that I can let everyone try the
>   virtual cockpit feature, instead of just the maintainers.

There's nothing wrong with posting *small* patches to the list, but do
keep in mind that some here are still on 56k and some of our European
members pay for access by the minute.

> 
> + They're not nearly so hard to use as they seem the first time you
>   try them.  Alas, (or maybe Lo! is a better word) "patch" is a Larry
>   Wall program.  This means that it carries a lot of the same "figure
>   out what the user wants, no matter how inscrutable the logic"
>   baggage that perl does.  But just like perl, once you are over the
>   learning curve it's a truly great tool that Just Works.
> 
>   Basically, from your FlightGear tree:
>    % cvs diff > feature99.patch
>   And someone else can do:
>    % patch < feature99.patch
>   And everything works as advertised.
> 
> Andy
> 
> -- 
> Andrew J. Ross                NextBus Information Systems
> Senior Software Engineer      Emeryville, CA
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]              http://www.nextbus.com
> "Men go crazy in conflagrations.  They only get better one by one."
>  - Sting (misquoted)
> 
> 
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-- 
Tony Peden
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We all know Linux is great ... it does infinite loops in 5 seconds. 
-- attributed to Linus Torvalds

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