Re: [Quilt-dev] [PATCH] fix diffstat garbage output

[Jean Delvare]

[Josh Boyer]
> When the --diffstat option is used with 'quilt ref', one gets output
> like the following:
>
> address@hidden quilt]$ quilt refresh
> /tmp/quilt_refresh.N21384
> .
> Refreshed patch fix-diffstat-garbage.patch
>
> The listing of the temporary file and the extra "." or ".." characters
> is just noise.

This is a misbehavior of diffstat, which was fixed in version 1.32. Prior
to 1.32, diffstat would show the operation progress on stderr if stdout
was redirected. From 1.32, the default behavior is to keep quiet unless
excplicitely asked to show the operation progress with -v.

So I suspect you are using an old version of diffstat, and simply want to
upgrade.

[Josh Boyer]
> The following patch should fix it so this is no longer
> printed.
> (...)
> -     diffstat="$(@DIFFSTAT@ -p$opt_strip_level $tmp_patch)" || die 1
> +     diffstat="$(@DIFFSTAT@ -p$opt_strip_level $tmp_patch 2> /dev/null)"
>       || die 1

Bad idea. Hiding *all* possible error messages from diffstat in order to
discard "garbage" which shouldn't be there in the first place is
inadequate and dangerous. Let's not fix quilt where it isn't broken,
especially since a proper fix exists for over two years now.

We may want to document the problem in quilt and state that quilt
requires diffstat >= 1.32 for proper "quilf refresh --diffstat"
operation. Maybe we could even have ./configure check for the version?

Thanks,
--
Jean Delvare