Re: [Quilt-dev] [PATCH] Only touch the .timestamp file if needed.

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Markus,

[Markus Oberhumer]
> > > Please review and apply if you find it useful.
> > > (...)
> > > [PATCH] Only touch the .timestamp file if needed.

[Jean Delvare] 
> > I fail to see the benefit, can you please explain?

[Markus Oberhumer]
> well, it's the the correct thing to do.

I'm not convinced, sorry ;)

The timestamp means "at that time, the patch was up-to-date". In that
respect the current implementation is correct. And so is yours, but why
change something that works?

> But the main reason is that I often use "quilt refresh" as a substitute for 
> a missing "quilt status", and this way it will better work on read-only 
> mounts - at least if the patch is unchanged.

Using quilt on read-only mounts doesn't make much sense to me. Or at
least you wouldn't run "quilt refresh" in these conditions. And your
fix hardly addresses this problem, as if a patch needs to be refreshed
you'll still have an error.

If you need "quilt status" maybe it would be better to implement this.
I remember this was discussed once already [1], and the problem was that
not everyone agreed on what information quilt status should print.
Maybe you want instead a flag to quilt refresh which would emulate the
refresh but not actually do it. E.g.:

$ quilt refresh --needed
Patch $patch would need to be refreshed
$

Just an idea though.

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/quilt-dev/2006-01/msg00020.html

-- 
Jean Delvare