[Quilt-dev] Bug#333480: quilt: no way to avoid patch -E option

[Martin Quinson]

Another bug I received in the debian BTS a while ago. I'm really unsure
about what to do here.

Thanks for any advice,
Mt.

----- Forwarded message from Rob Browning <address@hidden> -----

Subject: Bug#333480: quilt: no way to avoid patch -E option
X-Debian-PR-Package: quilt
From: Rob Browning <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 23:29:52 -0700
User-Agent: Gnus/5.110004 (No Gnus v0.4) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux)


Package: quilt
Version 0.42-1

Quilt currently appears to unconditionally insert -E as a patch
argument (see /usr/share/quilt/patch).  This causes it to remove files
that end up with a size of 0 after patching.

The patch manpage suggests that -E isn't normally necessary, and it
can cause trouble.

For example, after updating all of the autofiles for emacs21,
aclocal.m4 will have been reduced to a size of 0, but it still exists,
and the emacs Makefile depends on it existing.  If the resulting
autofiles diff is represented as a quilt patch, then when it is
applied, aclocal.m4 will be removed (rather than left with a size of
0), and the emacs build will fail.

There may be some reason that quilt depends on this behavior, but if
not, it would be nice if there were some option to control the use of
-E when calling patch.  It would be ideal (though perhaps not
feasible), if the use of -E could be specified per-patch, as with -p,
but a global control, or additional argument to quilt push, would be
sufficient.

Also, I listed this bug at normal severity because I wasn't sure
that it wasn't a real bug, but it might also just rate wishlist.

Thanks
-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG starting 2002-11-03 = 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592  F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4



----- End forwarded message -----

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