Re: Re: being nice to patch(1)

On Tue, 3 Jul 2007 15:34:46 +0200 Andreas Gruenbacher [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tuesday 03 July 2007 02:28, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

So I would suggest that in quilt and other systems, you either:

 - strip all headers manually

 - forget about "patch", and use "git-apply" instead that does things
   right and doesn't screw up like this (and can do rename diffs etc too).

I guess the second choice generally isn't an option, but dammit,
"git-apply" really is the better program here.

I'm in bit of a conflict with choice one: when applying patches in an 
automated build process or similar, the likely way to do so is a simple loop 
over the series file. So the less magic when applying patches with quilt, the 
better.

Turning off the insane heuristic with patch -u will do well enough I hope. 
Quilt does not use that option by default because it also supports context 
diffs (some people / projects prefer them), but that can easily be customized 
in .quiltrc:

    QUILT_PATCH_OPTS=-u

I guess one could try `patch -p1' and if that failed, `patch -p1 -u'.

But the problem is that patch will get stuck in interactive mode prompting
for a filename.  I've never actually worked how to make patch(1) just fail
rather than going interactive, not that I've tried terribly hard.  Any
hints there?

Thanks.