git/list[1] front-page[2] threads[3] people[4] search[5] about
 

Re: git-diff/git-format-patch safe for GNU (or POSIX) patch?

From
Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>
Date
Jun 26, 2008, 13:44 UTC
Message-ID
<20080626134400.GC12567@machine.or.cz>
In-Reply-To
<58284.213.203.159.164.1214480989.squirrel@upmail.polettix.it>
On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 01:49:49PM +0200, Flavio Poletti wrote:
Show 5 quoted lines
> Thanks for the feedback! I wonder if this feature of patch "ignoring"
> stuff it doesn't understand is a GNU feature or a POSIX feature, but I'm
> abusing your patience here. (Incidentally, I also saw that POSIX has no
> "unified" format, but this "ignoring" feature might apply in a wider
> sense).

As you say, POSIX does not specify unified diffs at all. I'm not sure if patch's policy is as relaxed for other formats and I didn't find any mention of this relaxed policy in the SUS spec, but unified diffs with extraneous information intertwined are extremely widespread; about any VCSes out there append extra information to the diffs.

Incidentally, does anyone actually know about _any_ other patch tool in the wild that is _not_ based on the original Larry Wall's patch?

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
The last good thing written in C++ was the Pachelbel Canon. -- J. Olson
Previous: Karl Hasselström
Message 5 of 5 in “git-diff/git-format-patch safe for GNU (or POSIX) patch?”
  1. Flavio PolettiJun 26, 2008
  2. Karl HasselströmJun 26, 2008
  3. Flavio PolettiJun 26, 2008
  4. Karl HasselströmJun 26, 2008
  5. Petr BaudisJun 26, 2008

Read the whole thread, see it on lore, or plain text.

$ cat FOOTERMessages come from the public archive at lore.kernel.org/git, fetched every hour. The front page is chosen and written each morning by an AI editor and can be wrong; the threads themselves are the record. About and API. For agents: an MCP server at https://gitlist.dev/mcp, and any thread, story or person page as Markdown by adding .md to its URL (or sending Accept: text/markdown). Details in /llms.txt.