From: Daniel Barkalow Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 20:08:16 GMT Subject: Re: Patch (apply) vs. Pull Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Wed, 22 Jun 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote: > Anyway, it's not a trivial problem. You can search for patch matches in > the patch history, but the thing is, that will fail whenever a patch was > edited for whitespace etc (which does end up happening often enough to > matter). The same goes even more for the commit messages (I routinely not > only add my sign-off, of course, but also fix typo's I notice and often > end up reformatting whitespace). If each patch is given an ID by the author (not committer) which is preserved across various later modifications, we could at least recognize which patch it was. Then we could present the author with the information that the patch was accepted and was modified, and give the author the option of replacing it in the series with one that reverts some or all of the modifications (including re-adding dropped portions). I don't see any reason that it would be better to search for similarity rather than just having things explicitly tagged (I think, although I'm not sure, that authors will care about the difference between someone applying an alternative patch and someone applying the author's patch with modifications. -Daniel *This .sig left intentionally blank*