From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:55:02 GMT
Subject: Re: being nice to patch(1)
Message-ID: <87zm2dxl5l.fsf@penguin.cs.ucla.edu>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.98.0707031159580.9434@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

> Anyway, I tried to look at the patch sources, but I had to stop. That 
> whole "intuit_diff_type()" function is probably designed as an initiation 
> rite for any patch programmers, and to make sure that you have to be 
> really serious about wanting to send patches before you can become part of 
> the "in crowd". It's "mental hazing".

You should have seen it in the good old days when Larry Wall wrote it.
It was at least -- at least! -- 10% worse.

> In this case, the improvement would be to simply ignore indented patches 
> (preferably by default, but at least have the option to do so).

I agree.  POSIX has tied our hands to some extent, though, since it
_requires_ patch to accept indented patches by default.  It's too late
to fix this in the current POSIX go-round, but we can fix it in the
next.  And in the mean time we can add an option, I suppose defaulting
to not stripping indentation unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.  That
would be fine with me.

I'll add it to my list of things to do.