Re: [Quilt-dev] 0.50 in Debian + Simple patch for inclusion: Fix manpage generation under dash

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Martin,

On Friday 23 December 2011 04:23:19 pm Martin Quinson wrote:
> Raphaël packaged 0.50 for Debian a few days ago, and so far it all
> goes rather well. Only some glitches against the packaging itself
>  were reported, nothing against the code.

Thanks for the testing and report! 0.50 is in openSUSE Factory since 
December 21st too. There doesn't seem to have been any bug reported for 
it since then (I was on vacation.)

Note that the bare 0.50 has a couple of known issues, so I hope you 
picked the patches from the git repository. In particular 
00e551287a23749c7d1b0bc3e25741a5bd360bcd and 
a8eae6b84f446e9cda14977acba88ead040a4600.

> Also, now that we are on par with upstream code, we'd like to reduce
>  a bit the amount of patches that we have in the package. For the
>  record, our series file contains 16 patches, several of them being
>  rather simple. I'm proposing a first one, in attachement. If nobody
>  complains in the next few days, I'll commit it myself before
>  proceeding to the next patch.
> 
> It may seem like a noisy way of integrating our stuff, but I prefer
>  to play safe with quilt. It's heavily used and I feel my technical
>  limits here. So, sorry for the noise, but that's how I'll do it.

It's OK, that's basically the same I'm doing for Suse.

>  If you prefer, the whole patch serie is available here:
> http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/quilt.git

And now to the patch itself...

>Description: Fix auto-generation of quilt.1 to work with dash
> The echo command of dash interprets \f as a special characer and
> thus generates a bad manual page. bash's echo leaves them unchanged
> (it needs -e to replace those special characters). Using printf
> instead is a portable solution that work with both shells.

No problem with this.

> The code also uses a bashism ($'') but it's not really needed with
> GNU sed at least (it understands \t and \n) so drop it and avoid some
> painful double escaping.

I assume that $'' isn't supported by dash and this is why you want to 
get rid of it?

I don't think we currently require GNU sed. Have you tested your changes 
on BSD or Solaris? If we now need sed to support \t and \n, it would be 
great to test this during configure to avoid a mysterious or even silent 
failure during the build. 

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare
Suse L3