It seems that this mail never went through, so I'm resending it. Jean, you said that you wanted to add some documentation, so you may want to use it as a base.
Bye, Mt. ----- Forwarded message from Martin Quinson <[email protected]> ----- Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:48:34 +0100 From: Martin Quinson <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Quilt-dev] [PATCH, RFC] Stop using patch option -E User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 07:06:25PM +0100, Andreas Grünbacher wrote: > Jean, > > 2012/12/18 Jean Delvare <[email protected]>: > > GNU patch version 2.7 and newer deals just fine with empty files, > > however our use of option -E breaks this feature. So stop using this > > option. Anyway, the manual page says: "Normally this option is > > unnecessary" and the test suite passes just fine without it. > > > > Andreas, can you remember why we were using option -E? I dug the history > > but apparently it has been there since the beginning so I couldn't find > > an explanation. > > when patch is in POSIX mode or the patch format doesn't allow to distinguish > empty files from deleted files, patch deletes empty files only if the -E > option > is given. If the -E option is given, patch always deletes empty files. > > So if you want to use the -E option or not depends on which kinds of patches > you use: with "modern" unified or context diffs as generated by GNU diff or > git, > you usually don't want -E; with other patch formats, you usually do want -E. > > So I think your change makes sense; if people want -E, they can put it in > $QUILT_PATCH_OPTS. You may want to add the following patch, then. Thanks for your time, both of you. Mt diff --git a/doc/quilt.1.in b/doc/quilt.1.in index db91b14..8cb0106 100644 --- a/doc/quilt.1.in +++ b/doc/quilt.1.in @@ -164,7 +164,19 @@ Additional options that quilt shall pass to GNU patch when applying patches. For example, recent versions of GNU patch support the "--reject-format=unified" option for generating reject files in unified diff style (older patch versions used "--unified-reject-files" for that). - + +You may also want to add the "-E" option if you are experiencing +issues having quilt to delete empty files. The documentation of GNU +patch says that "normally this option is unnecessary", but when patch +is in POSIX mode or if the patch format doesn't allow to distinguish +empty files from deleted files, patch deletes empty files only if the +-E option is given. + +So whether or not adding the -E option actually depends on which kinds +of patches is used: with "modern" unified or context diffs as +generated by GNU diff or git, you usually don't want -E; with other +patch formats, you usually do want -E. + .IP QUILT_DIFFSTAT_OPTS 4 Additional options that quilt shall pass to diffstat when generating _______________________________________________ Quilt-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/quilt-dev
