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Subject: GNU patch: upcoming stable release; call for testing Date: Sunday 02 May 2010 From: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de> To: info-gnu@gnu.org
I am pleased to announce that there is progress towards the next stable release of GNU patch. This is a call for testing so that things will work as expected, on as many platforms as possible.
The upcoming release will include several new features:
* Support for most features of the "diff --git" format: renames and copies, permission changes, symlink diffs. (Binary diffs are not supported yet; patch will complain and skip them.)
* Support for double-quoted filenames: when a filename in a context diff starts with a double quote, it is interpreted as a C string literal. The escape sequences \\, \", \a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v, and \ooo (a three-digit octal number between 0 and 255) are recognized.
* Refuse to patch read-only files by default, or at least warn when patching such files with --force or --batch.
* Refuse to apply a normal patch to a symlink. (Previous versions of patch were wrongly replacing the symlink with a regular file.)
* When a timestamp specifies a time zone, honor that instead of assuming the local time zone (--set-date) or Universal Coordinated Time (--set-utc).
* Support for nanosecond precision timestamps.
Behind the scenes, some infrastructure changes have happened as well: the project now uses GNU Automake, and the previous, static copy of the Gnulib library has been replaced by a git submodule.
The project home with the development repository, bug tracker, and bug- patch@gnu.org mailing list archive is located at:
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/patch
Development snapshots will be made available on:
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/patch/
Previous stable releases are available at:
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/patch/
Please send bug reports or suggestions to <bug-patch@gnu.org>.
Thanks, Andreas
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