Re: [Quilt-dev] After refresh, file renames are transformed to addition/deletion

[Andreas Grünbacher]

Am Mo., 29. Jan. 2024 um 15:05 Uhr schrieb Fab Stz via Quilt-dev
<quilt-dev@nongnu.org>:
> Hello,
>
> I'm seeing this behavior [1]:
>
> I have a patch with this content to rename a file
>
> diff --git a/qttools/src/assistant/qlitehtml/src/3rdparty/GUMBO-AUTHORS.txt b/
> qttools/src/assistant/qlitehtml/src/3rdparty/litehtml/src/gumbo/GUMBO-
> AUTHORS.txt
> similarity index 100%
> rename from GUMBO-AUTHORS.txt
> rename to GUMBO-AUTHORS.txt
>
> It applies fine, but when I refresh, it get transformed to a file addition + a
> file deletion with their respective full content.
>
> Is it possible to preserve this?

Refresh is currently based on GNU diff; on top of that, quilt only
tracks which files are part of the patch. This doesn't allow
preserving renames, unfortunately.

It might be possible to rewrite the refresh command to use git instead
of GNU diff, but it's not how git is normally used, so that might be
difficult.

> I also noticed another behavior [2]:
>
> If I have a rename A->B, and then a modification of content for B, "push"
> applies fine. But when I "pop" it complains that the file is missing.
> Something probably related to the order in which the blocks of the patch file
> are processed. It seems it processes them in the order of the chunks from top
> to bottom, even during "pop". Is this intended?

The output of "git patch" will never do that; it will only rename a
file and modify it in a single step. So you are probably looking at
several concatenated patches, and those are not guaranteed to work
correctly. I would still expect the pop command to do the right thing
though, so this could be a bug in GNU patch. Can you send an example,
or better yet, create a small test case that demonstrates the problem?

Thanks,
Andreas