[Quilt-dev] Proposed update to the fork help

[Jean Delvare]

Hi all,

As discussed in an earlier thread, I think that the "fork" command of
quilt isn't properly documented. There is an explanation of what it is
meant for in the quilt introduction document (PDF), but nothing in
"quilt fork -h", where users would look for it IMHO.

What about the following?

  Fork the topmost patch.  Forking a patch means creating a verbatim
  copy of it under a new name, and use that new name instead of the
  original one in the current series.  This is useful when a patch
  has to be modified, but the original version of it needs to be
  preserved, e.g. because it is used in another series, or for the
  history.  A typical sequence of commands would be: fork, edit,
  refresh.

  If new_name is missing, the name of the forked patch will be the
  current patch name, followed by "-2".  If the patch name already
  ends in a dash-and-number, the number is further incremented
  (e.g., patch.diff, patch-2.diff, patch-3.diff).

The first sentence and second paragraph are the current help, the rest
is what I think could be added. Needless to say I am open to
suggestions, and comments about wording are also welcome, as I am no
native English speaker. Once we will have agreed on what the text should
read, I'll provide a proper patch against quilt CVS.

Thanks to Greg KH for his early review of this proposed text update.

-- 
Jean Delvare