Re: [Quilt-dev] quilt diff and stderr

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Thursday 01 September 2005 20:33, Jean Delvare wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The "diff" command of quilt currently prints a message on stderr in
> certain circumstances:
>
> More recent patches modify files in patch X
>
> And this is true, but I don't quite see how this constitutes an error.
>
> This seems to be more of an additional information of arguable interest
> than an error. Or am I missing something?

Yes, it's not an error but only a warning. No error is returned. Maybe we 
could make that more obvious. I disagree with your assessment that the 
information is irrelevant though: the user may have modified some of the 
files that patches further on top of the stack modify as well, expecting the 
changes to show up in the below patch, but they won't. This could cause a lot 
of confusion.

> Actually, I don't understand by what rationale this message is returned
> by "quilt diff". The diff command is about extracting/combining diffs
> out of the set of currently applied patches, it's not about dependencies
> between patches. The files, patches and graph commands can answer that
> kind of question much more efficiently.

The diff command is also about seeing what will be in a patch after the next 
refresh.

> I am concerned about this error message confusing front-ends to quilt,
> as it will trigger even when no actual error happened. Due to the
> limited interest the message seems to have, the most simple fix would be
> to simply drop it.
>
> Are there objections to me doing so?

Yes. I'm fine with making it an explicit warning though.

-- Andreas.