Difficulty applying multi-file patches from within emacs (Was: Proposal: new mode-line `%'-construct %o ..)

[Kaushal Modi]

On Sat, May 20, 2017 at 6:35 AM Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> wrote:

On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 20:44:17 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Hello, Emacs.

> I've always been annoyed by the percentage output by the mode-line
> construct "%p" - so much so that I patched my personal copy of
> `decode-mode-spec' in xdisp.c over ten years ago (thanks for the tip
> then, Eli!).

[ .... ]

Here is a patch which implements %o and %q.  Feedback would be welcome,
of course.

Hello,

I wanted to try out this patch, but I faced issues applying multi-file patch from within emacs. If this were a git-formatted patch, I would have tried "git am". But as this is a plain diff patch, that wouldn't work and I attempted M-x ediff-patch-file.

But then I ended with with an issue which is well-described by Michael (copied on this email) in a thread on help-gnu-emacs back in Feb this year: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2017-02/msg00035.html

It's the same issue that when I specify the root dir for all the patches to be applied, ediff-patch-file in my case (epatch in the case in that Feb 2017 thread) does not parse the subdirs for the unified diff format headers.

In that thread, Eli suggests using patch utility directly from the command-line. But I really wished ediff-patch-file/epatch worked correctly when applying multi-file patches.

So the reason for this thread is:

- Has anyone been able to apply multi-file patches from within emacs? If so, how?

- If someone has worked out the issues with ediff-patch-file/epatch for this issue and the solution is lying around in their workarea, it would be awesome if they provided a patch to fix it upstream :)

- I followed that Feb 2017 help thread, and it wasn't clear if a solution was reached.. was it?

--

Kaushal Modi