Re: RFC round 5: DEP-3: Patch Tagging Guidelines
On Tue, Sep 08 2009, Ben Finney wrote:
> Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
>> What format do the other DVCS systems use for patch export?
>
> Bazaar users generate a “merge directive” for serialising a change set
> <URL:http://bazaar-vcs.org/MergeDirective>. The merge directive is
> metadata to be read by the ‘bzr merge’ command; it is commonly
> accompanied in the same message by a plain-text ‘bzr diff’ output.
That does not seem to be a good format for a patch scheme,
since it is dependent on specialized code to implement it.
>> Also, the git format-patch command can include encoded binary files,
>> which I don't think patch(1) can handle.
>
> Right, all these serialisations are essentially supersets of what
> ‘patch(1)’ can do, since they include things like removing files etc.
True. But our use case would still have a simple patch in the
body; we are mostly talking about the header fields and the preamble in
the body. Post the signature separator, the contents are still a
simple patch. The resulting format is _compatible_ with git
format-patch and git am, but not identical.
Seems to me that we have a widely used convention (which might
not be universal) that will meet our needs, and at least seems
compatible with a lot of software under distributed version control. I
think it well behooves us to re-use this, rather than go off an
reinvent the wheel ourselves and be incompatible with _everything_ else
out there.
manoj
--
"No wife of *mine* is doing any dishes. That's what we had the kid
for." from Deathlok comics #1
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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