Re: [Quilt-dev] quilt on SuSE 7.2 and Windows

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

Hello,

On Sunday 24 July 2005 17:19, John Vandenberg wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been tinkering with quilt in order to use it on a SuSE 7.2
> development server and on Windows using msys.  Here is a list of the
> problems, mainly in the test execution rather than the quilt code.

Okay, test suite bugs bother me less wrt. backward compatibility.

> GNU fileutils 4.0.35
> --------------------
> The output of ls -l appears to have changed over the years, causing an
> error in perms.test on SuSE 7.2.

What changed? This may have to do with the setting of LANG, LC_ALL, or 
similar.

> gawk 3.0.6
> ----------
> the GNU function asort used in patchfns.in is not available.

Does the old gawk have any sorting mechanism? Otherwise we could use sort 
instead.

> sed 3.02
> --------
> The -i option used in annotate.test is not available.
> Earlier versions of sed do not interpret \t as 0x09, causing many
> failures in the test suite.
> example1.test uses the 4a command, which doesn't appear to be supported.

We could use ed etc. instead.

> diff 2.7
> --------
> When one of the files doesn't exist, diff 2.7 prints an error on
> stderr, while later versions operate normally as if the file was
> empty.
> (annotate.test line 84 fails)

can you run the test with ``./run -l 84'', and then send me the result of 
running ``quilt --trace annotate jkl''?

> bash 2.04
> ---------
> diff.in uses some funky pipe syntax that was introduced in 2.05.

"< <(...)" you mean?

> patch 2.5
> ---------
> the output of 2.5 and 2.5.4 are very different.  regex support was
> added to test/run to allow the tests to handle this in order to
> minimise the number of changes to quilt/*

Hm... what did you change?

> msys 1.0.11
> -----------
> msys is missing column, tac, getopt, and ed, which is indirectly used
> by patch in annotate.in.  EOL issues abound, and the backup-files
> restoration command line in push.in and pop.in trigger trigger the
> msys shell to replace the trailing '-' with '-<current path>'.
>
> For anyone interested in trying this madness, column, getopt, and a
> few other binaries from util-linux can be found here:
> http://zeroj.hda0.net/util-mingw/
>
> A semi-complete binary tarball:
> http://zeroj.hda0.net/quilt-0.41-bin.tgz
>
> and my first patch series:
> http://zeroj.hda0.net/quilt-patches/
>
> The tests that fail are:
> annotate.test: missing ed
> dotglob.test: not sure
> perms.test: umask is not well respected on Windows
>
> Are the quilt maintainers interested in accepting patches to support
> older & stranger platforms like these?

As long as the patches don't badly mess up the code or slow things down too 
badly, I think we will accept UNIX patches, yes.

Porting quilt to Windows sounds more like an exercise in masochism: quilt 
relies on the UNIX toolchain  a lot and Windows has much slower process 
startup times, so quilt will never run well as far as I can see. I'm not sure 
we should even bother. I'll surely take obvious things, and things that won't 
hurt otherwise.

Cheers,
-- 
Andreas Gruenbacher <address@hidden>
SUSE Labs, SUSE LINUX PRODUCTS GMBH