[Quilt-dev] a-b-style patches

[Jean Delvare]

Hi all,

I have an objection to the current implementation of the new "-p ab"
option. I seem to understand that it works the following way:
1* The user can pass "-p ab" to the diff and refresh commands to
   generate an a-b-style patch.
2* The user can add -pab after any patch file name in the series file,
   to have it refreshed as an a-b-style patch by default.

While I am fine with the first feature, I am not with the second. My
reasons are:
* It is undocumented.
* If used, it breaks compatibility with all previous versions of quilt.
  So far, the options after a patch file name were only meant to be
  passed to the patch command, quilt itself wasn't supposed to use them.
* It is inconsistent. "-p ab" is only one option to alter the way a
  given patch is refreshed. If we want the user to be able to set
  individual refresh defaults for each patch, then shouldn't we also
  support --no-timestamps, --no-index, --diffstat, --sort, --backup and
  --strip-trailing-whitespace?

I'd rather back out this undocumented feature for now. I'm not even
sure if it is useful to anyone. If someone later asks for this feature,
then we can think of the best way to implement it, and document it
properly.

Comments anyone?

-- 
Jean Delvare