Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 00:12:50 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Mike Barcroft <mike@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG, "M. Warner Losh" <imp@village.org>, freebsd-standards@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: diff & patch problem with 'No newline' Message-ID: <p05111718b8ee70b3633a@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <20020425210035.A43192@espresso.q9media.com> References: <200202091752.g19HqFP11551@green.bikeshed.org> <p05101421b88b76a6aa12@[128.113.24.47]> <20020210040158.A26957@chiark.greenend.org.uk> <p05101422b88ba26bec5e@[128.113.24.47]> <p05111715b8ee4710a108@[128.113.24.47]> <20020425210035.A43192@espresso.q9media.com>
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At 9:00 PM -0400 4/25/02, Mike Barcroft wrote: >Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> writes: >> And now, a mere two months later, I finally looked into it. >> Changing 'diff' is trivial, but the main issue is changing >> 'patch' to match. >> >> I found out that NetBSD had made changes to 'patch' so it >> does understand these lines. I copy&pasted those changes >> into our version, and it looks like it works right. The >> patch is pretty straightforward, and I would like to get >> it into our patch in for 4.6-release (along with the minor >> change to 'diff'). Any objections? > >Yes. I still maintain that files without a trailing new >line are not "text files", and should therefore be treated >as binary files. Even if we did consider these to be "text >files", no standards that I'm aware of define the behavior >for this situation, so a non-standard patch utility would >be required to interpret these extensions. Well, here is a campaign speech for this little patch... :-) Adding the support to 'patch' will not break any patch which does follow the standard. If we revert the change made to 'diff' several years ago, then I admit we will occasionally create patches that are not standard. Those patches will be non-standard in a well-known and easily fixable format. This will create no insurmountable (or even difficult) problem for anyone who receives the patch. All a person has to do is delete the one line, and they will have a patch which behaves exactly the same way as the patch we currently produce. They can even do this blindly, using a filter to strip out the line. So, that's my pitch. I feel fairly strongly that there is a real advantage in following the lead of Linux (+anyone using gnu-diff) and NetBSD in this matter. How strongly do others feel that we should stick to the letter of this standard, because they feel the standard really has the right idea? And if you feel that way, then could you please explain to me what the advantage is? Can you come up with any tangible benefit of the standard which would convince a linux user to give up this non-standard extension which they have been using for at least five years? -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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