Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
On Thursday, 02 March 2006 07:25, Peter Williams wrote:
... "quilt files <patch>" produces empty output when <patch> is not
applied? Was this a deliberate design decision? If so what was the
logic behind it?
The current version of quilt will tell you that the specified patch is not
applied; it doesn't fail silently.
Quilt won't try to list the files that an unapplied patch touches because this
can't be done very well: GNU patch uses complicated heuristics to decide
which filename it will patch
This shouldn't be necessary for patches in quilt. It should be VERY
well known which files will be effected by a patch.
(see Multiple Patches in a File in the diff info
pages). You can use utilities like lsdiff for that purpose,
That involves me knowing/exploiting the internal workings of quilt which
is not a "good thing"(TM) IMHO.
but lsdiff will
also guess wrong for some patches.
If I remember correctly Andrew's patch management utilities which were
the inspiration for quilt (I believe) kept the list of files in a patch
as a separate piece of data in the database. Apart from the fact it
would enable "quilt files <patch>" to give a useful response, doing
something similar in quilt would also cure one of its other annoyances
namely files going missing from a patch if the patch is popped when
there is currently no modifications to the file.
Although this problem could be described as a feature (i.e. automatic
trimming of the patch file list) I think that it's a bug. It can lead
to problems such as the user editing a file because he thinks it's in
the patch because he put it there and didn't take it out.
Peter
PS I also think that "patch diff" should display diffs for unapplied
patches IFF there is a patch file available. It's sometimes very useful
to be able to check what changes a patch will make before it is applied.
And yes, I know that I could look at the file directly BUT that
involves me knowing/exploiting the internal workings of quilt which is
not a "good thing"(TM).
--
Peter Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious."
-- Ambrose Bierce
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