Re: stgit truncates binary files to zero length when applying patches

On 2005-11-16 12:31:27 +0000, Catalin Marinas wrote:

On 16/11/05, Karl Hasselström [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On 2005-11-16 11:11:56 +0000, Catalin Marinas wrote:

quoted

Unfortunately, git-apply doesn't fail for patches including
binary files and simply creates an empty file. I think git-apply
should be changed to fail to apply this kind of patches.

Yes, at least if stgit is going to continue to use it like this.
Refusing to handle binary files is somewhat disappointing, but
still OK; agreeing to handle them and then silently wiping them is
a bit less OK.

A workaround for this would be to add a config option for StGIT to
always use the three-way merge for pushing patches. The problem with
this is speed since git-diff-tree | git-apply is much faster (and
pretty safe since fuzzy patching is not allowed) and most of the
patches would apply cleanly with only this.

The proper fix has to be to convince git-apply to either handle
patches with binary files, or to make it fail; in both cases, stgit
will be fine. If the former is somehow intractable or undesirable, and
the latter would break existing callers (and/or inconvenience users),
perhaps it could fail on binary files only when a --text-only flag was
given.

-- 
Karl Hasselström, kha@treskal.com
      www.treskal.com/kalle