Re: [PATCH 2/2] diff: --quote-path-with-sp

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed, Sep 15 2021, Junio C Hamano wrote:

[CC-ing Andreas Gruenbacher who's currently active in GNU patch
development, and Paul Eggert at his current address, in case he's
curious about this blast from the past.

Both: The full context for this proposed change in Git is at
https://lore.kernel.org/git/20210915223316.1653443-1-gitster@pobox.com/ (local)]

quoted

Long time ago, we had a discussion with GNU patch/diff maintainer
and agreed that pathnames with certain "difficult" bytes needs to be
quoted to ensure the resulting patch is machine parseable in an
unambiguous way [*1*].  Recently, we saw a report that found that
GNU patch is unhappy with our diff output for a path with SP in it
[*2*].

It would also be good to mention 4f6fbcdcf96 ...

Ah, I didn't mean "this is the single message to understand the
issue".  The reference was meant as "you need to read the discussion
that starts around here", which you apparently did ;-)

There is another message that is much more relevant that does not
appear in the thread (and I do not know its message ID), where Linus
came up with a way to parse the "diff --git a/... b/..." line, or
the first "--- a/..." and "+++ b/..." lines, and learn the pathnames
on the preimage side and on the postimage side unambiguously.  I think
that discovery led to the current implementation.