Re: git apply: git diff header lacks filename information for git diff --no-index patch

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 4, 2008, 08:28 UTC
Message-ID: <gc79f4$22m$1@ger.gmane.org>
In-Reply-To: <20081004041714.GA12413@coredump.intra.peff.net>

[Cc: git@vger.kernel.org, Jeff King <peff@peff.net>, 
 Imre Deak <imre.deak@gmail.com>]

Jeff King wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Thu, Oct 02, 2008 at 09:27:36PM +0300, Imre Deak wrote:
> 
>> $ git apply patch
>> fatal: git diff header lacks filename information (line 4)
>> $ cat patch
>> diff --git a/dev/null b/a
>> new file mode 100644
>> index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..1f2a4f5ef3df7f7456d91c961da36fc58904f2f1
>> GIT binary patch
> 
> Hmm. The problem is that "git apply" doesn't accept that "a/dev/null"
> and "b/a" are the same, so it rejects them as a name. I

Shouldn't it be "/dev/null", not "a/dev/null"?

Besides git-diff(1) states:

  1. It is preceded with a "git diff" header, that looks like
     this:

       diff --git a/file1 b/file2

     The `a/` and `b/` filenames are the same unless rename/copy is
     involved.  Especially, even for a creation or a deletion,
     `/dev/null` is _not_ used in place of `a/` or `b/` filenames.

Looks like a bug in patch generation code...

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Warsaw, Poland
ShadeHawk on #git