Re: Your daily GNU ISO in one click!

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Tuesday 04 May 2010 01:18:27 Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Interestingly, the next ISO build failed because of commit
> cabd1add5753f9c5479011383e844a9ee93b387b in GNU Patch, which makes
> ‘patch’ return an error when attempting to patch a read-only file:
> 
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> applying Debian patch `00_man_quoting.diff'...
> File hosts_access.5 is read-only; refusing to patch
> 2 out of 2 hunks ignored -- saving rejects to file hosts_access.5.rej
> File hosts_options.5 is read-only; refusing to patch
> 1 out of 1 hunk ignored -- saving rejects to file hosts_options.5.rej
> File tcpdmatch.8 is read-only; refusing to patch
> 3 out of 3 hunks ignored -- saving rejects to file tcpdmatch.8.rej
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

See this bug report:

        https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?28454

On the one hand, according to POSIX, patch is not supposed to patch read-only 
files.  On the other hand, it historically did exactly that.  Let's see if we 
can handle the fallout caused by the fixed behavior; otherwise, we'll have to 
keep patch broken for backwards compatibility, or maybe warn now, and turn the 
warning into an error in a future release.

The -f (--force) or -t (--batch) options will force patch to modify read-only 
files (even though it will still warn).  It usually makes sense to use one of 
those two options when automatically applying patches; patch's interactive 
questions are not useful in such cases, anyway.

Thanks,
Andreas