[Gnu-arch-users] libpatch hack WAS: --forward mostly harmless

[Eric Wong]

Patrick Mauritz <address@hidden> wrote:
> Am Montag, 13. September 2004 04:56 schrieb Tom Lord:
> > Seconded.  A less buggy implementation *might* be useful but I support
> > with "remove this which never worked properly and then await
> > legitimate demand (with skepticism) before installing a corrected
> > version" rather than simply "fix".
> would it be acceptable to have arch, in the case of --forward split the patch 
> in several patches for the same file, to work around this buggy behaviour?
> 
> an alternative could be to import patch into tla as library and do the 
> necessary tweaks there - a libpatch might be necessary to significantly boost 
> tla/win32's performance anyway.

I took a stab at integrating patch into tla the other night.  It was a
fairly quick hack on my part, and probably not optimal.  I chased down
some fd leakage, and removed some large text sections (help/usage) in an
attempt to save some space.

After eliminating the fork/exec requirement for running patch, filling a
greedy revlib with 615 revisions didn't go any faster on my Debian
GNU/Linux (unstable) machine.  I guess the fork() implementation really
is as good as it's cracked up to be, or I did something horribly wrong
:) 

My work is here:

tla branch: (it's based off Tom's latest tla--devo-1.3):
tla--inline-exec--0--patch-1

The branch name says it all:
patch--libpatch-quick-n-dirty--2.5.9--patch-5

Put this into the tree-root of the tla--inline-exec directory and name
it libpatch.

Since the performance I was looking for is fairly disappointing at
initial use, I don't plan on continuing this myself.  Maybe users of
operating systems with a less-efficient fork() could try this out and
improve upon it.  I don't think I'll be gaining anything from it, and
attempting to maintain patch would be too much for me.

Archive: address@hidden
Location: http://des.petta-tech.bogomips.org/~eric/{archives}/2004b-ordinary/

Other notes:

package-framework seems quite nifty for easily creating a static library
out of patch.  However, I'm still using a ./configure-generated config.h
file, and it probably won't work on systems that differ from Debian
GNU/Linux too much.

-- 
Eric Wong

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