Re: [bug-patch] Time for a new release?

[Andreas Grünbacher]

Jean,

Am 16. April 2012 15:35 schrieb Jean Delvare <address@hidden>:
> So with the latest version of GNU patch, every "quilt push" results in a
> warning about read-only files. This is rather inconvenient and passing
> --quiet doesn't even make it go away. And "quilt push -f" fails. Bad.

Why does "quilt push -f" fail?

> I do agree that the previous behavior (silently operating on read-only
> files by default) was wrong, but I think the new behavior is wrong too.
> If I tell patch to operate on a read-only file with --backup option (as
> quilt does), it would seem that I know what I'm doing. So I think
> patching read-only files should be as silent and successful as it used
> to be as long as --backup option is used.

I really can't follow you here. Patch should behave consistently on
read-only files, whether or not it creates backups.

> [...] we don't want to make files writable before they are unlinked from
> the reference tree

A "cp --reflink" copy would work, but that is not widely supported yet. Maybe
we do need to let the user choose between the old and new behaviour.

Thanks,
Andreas