Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 13:44:11 -0400 (EDT) From: Trevor Johnson <trevor@jpj.net> To: Will Andrews <andrews@technologist.com> Cc: Satoshi Asami <asami@FreeBSD.ORG>, ports@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: proposal: update-patches Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.4.21.0007111207520.4848-100000@blues.jpj.net> In-Reply-To: <20000630134435.B45643@argon.gryphonsoft.com>
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On Fri, 30 Jun 2000, Will Andrews wrote: > I'm pretty sure that NetBSD's recently-imported pkgdiff does pretty much > the same thing, with perhaps a slightly different approach: > > http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgdiff/ I didn't find any mention of pkgdiff in Searching the FreeBSD Gnats system (including closed PRs), my copy of the FreeBSD sources, and my old ports@freebsd.org e-mail, I didn't find any mention of pkgdiff, so I'm guessing you mean it was recently imported into NetBSD (especially since you directed me to the NetBSD CVS Web site), not into FreeBSD. On my NetBSD box (which dates from March except that /usr/src/pkgsrc/ is from 1 July), I installed the pkgdiff package and gave the "mkpatches" and "patchdiff" commands--which seem to be the analogues to my proposal--a quick try. Suppose you need to patch foo.c. OpenBSD's update-patches will check in patches/ for a patch to that file. If it finds one, it will rename the old patch, adding the .orig extension, and save the new patch in place of the old one (that is, with the same name). If it does not find an existing patch, it will generate patches/patch-foo_c. NetBSD's mkpatches will generate patches in work/.newpatches/ named patch-aa and so on. The names of the patches are unrelated to the names of any existing patches. If there were existing patches, the porter can then run patchdiff, which will identify which patches in work/.newpatches/ match ones in patches/ and display the differences (and names of the changed files). The porter then is likely to want to move any patches which have changed out of work/.newpatches/ into patches/, changing their names if they replace an existing patch. With the OpenBSD system, the porter can compare the old and new patches by keeping a copy of the old patches/ (which I ordinarily do as a matter of course), removing the *.orig files from the updated patches/, and doing a recursive diff. Admittedly, the patchdiff output is easier to interpret because it mentions the names of the changed files. Unless something goes wrong, no moving/renaming is necessary with update-patches. Suppose that foo.c used to need a patch, then no longer did, and now needs one once again. With OpenBSD's update-patches, the new patch is automatically named patch-foo_c. If update-patches was used from the beginning, the old patch would have had the same name. IMO when peeking at the CVS repository this looks better than seeing a patch-aa,v which modified bar.c, then was retired, and now modifies foo.c. The patch-aa naming convention is completely uninformative and I see no advantage to it (the ports collection already has many filenames which are illegal on Minix or DOS, or a CD-ROM with DOS-compatible names). In summary, update-patches seems more thoroughly automated, so more convenient. It is an (IMO welcome) step away from the patch-aa convention, while remaining compatible with it. It works in favor of patches having a sensible history in the CVS repository. NetBSD's patchdiff looks handy, but the need for it is much less when using update-patches. -- Trevor Johnson http://jpj.net/~trevor/gpgkey.txt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message
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