Hi Jerome, > I've seen that one embed a description header in patches. E.g. it's > used by Linux developers to describe and sign their work. > > The patch man states > > patch tries to skip any leading garbage, apply the diff, > and then skip any trailing garbage. Thus you could feed an article or > message containing a diff listing to patch, and it should work. [..] > > I am wondering: > - are this description and the lines that follow the official > documentation of the patch format?
The manual page obviously documents the implementation of "patch" you are using, so I don't think we can call it "official documentation". However, the POSIX specification [1] for a "patch" utility says roughly the same: "The patch file shall contain zero or more lines of header information followed by one or more patches." Note that the POSIX specification doesn't seem to support trailing garbage (and quilt doesn't either). > -.are there any known issues with quilt dealing with patches > containing a description? In particular, is there a way for me to lose > them? Quilt handles leading comments in patch files just fine, and will preserve them on refresh. Additionally, it can insert and update a diffstat output in the header if kindly asked to do so. [1] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/patch.html -- Jean Delvare _______________________________________________ Quilt-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/quilt-dev
