From: Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:44:00 GMT
Subject: Re: git-diff/git-format-patch safe for GNU (or POSIX) patch?
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:
> 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