Re: [Quilt-dev] [PATCH] fix diffstat garbage output

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 10:09 +0200, Jean Delvare wrote:
> >
> > The listing of the temporary file and the extra "." or ".." characters
> > is just noise.
> 
> This is a misbehavior of diffstat, which was fixed in version 1.32. Prior
> to 1.32, diffstat would show the operation progress on stderr if stdout
> was redirected. From 1.32, the default behavior is to keep quiet unless
> excplicitely asked to show the operation progress with -v.
> 
> So I suspect you are using an old version of diffstat, and simply want to
> upgrade.

Ok, thanks for the information.

> 
> [Josh Boyer]
> > The following patch should fix it so this is no longer
> > printed.
> > (...)
> > -   diffstat="$(@DIFFSTAT@ -p$opt_strip_level $tmp_patch)" || die 1
> > +   diffstat="$(@DIFFSTAT@ -p$opt_strip_level $tmp_patch 2> /dev/null)"
> >       || die 1
> 
> Bad idea. Hiding *all* possible error messages from diffstat in order to
> discard "garbage" which shouldn't be there in the first place is
> inadequate and dangerous. Let's not fix quilt where it isn't broken,
> especially since a proper fix exists for over two years now.

Yes, good point.  I suppose that's why I shouldn't make patches right
before bed :).

> 
> We may want to document the problem in quilt and state that quilt
> requires diffstat >= 1.32 for proper "quilf refresh --diffstat"
> operation. Maybe we could even have ./configure check for the version?

I'd rather not make quilt require the newer diffstat.  The garbage may
be slightly annoying, but quilt doesn't really require the newest.
Plus, there are lots of users using 1.31 (anyone using Fedora Core 3),
and I'd rather not break quilt for them.

Let's just reject the patch for now and I'll work on getting the newer
diffstat into Fedora Core.

Thanks for the feedback.

josh