[Monotone-devel] mtn diff and patch doesn't work

[Ulf Ochsenfahrt]

Hi,

Max Nickel sent a patch to the mtteam mailing list that he got from mtn 
diff. I tried to apply this patch with the unix 'patch' command, but 
that did not work, although the patch looks very much like a 'diff' 
patch. Upon further investigation, this seems to be due to the line 
endings in the file. The situation looks like this:

I've got a file in an mtn workspace and performed a simple change. The 
mtn diff looks like this:

--- .project    0cd65f6dfb65ec47d5163015345d92a15fc8e31b
+++ .project    5feea50df0e752857916b212ed26287f9f464390
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <projectDescription>
-       <name>mtn</name>
+       <name>net.ensued.mtn</name>
        <comment></comment>
        <projects>
        </projects>


The 'diff' diff of the same file with a copy of the previous version 
looks like this:

--- .project.old        2007-03-29 12:13:37.000000000 +0200
+++ .project    2007-03-29 12:13:53.000000000 +0200
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <projectDescription>
-       <name>mtn</name>
+       <name>net.ensued.mtn</name>
        <comment></comment>
        <projects>
        </projects>


However, the second patch can be successfully applied with patch -p0, 
but the first cannot. The reason for this are the line endings. mtn diff 
outputs the platforms default line endings for all lines of the patch, 
while diff outputs unix line endings for the metadata and the files line 
endings for the content. I.e. the line endings in the second patch are 
mixed unix/dos endings, because the original file uses dos endings.
It works for files that use unix endings.

patch only works with the 'diff' diff (the second one) shown above. It 
doesn't work with all unix endings, and it doesn't work with all dos 
endings. It furthermore doesn't work if I specify -l (ignore white-space 
changes).

I doubt this can be fixed without breaking the user interface on windows 
machines. However, it would be nice if we got mtn patch that accepts mtn 
diff patches. Wasn't someone working on that?

Cheers,

-- Ulf