Re: [Quilt-dev] [PATCH] Enhanced decoration for "series -v" command

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Wednesday 15 June 2005 04:45, Peter Williams wrote:
> I've been looking at a method to tell whether just one file in a patch
> needs refreshing (to use as the last check in files_may_have_changed)
> and would like to use one of the commands (filterdiff) from patchutils
>
> <http://freshmeat.net/projects/patchutils/>
>
> to extract the patch for the file in question from the patch file so
> that it can be used to modify a copy of the file for comparison with the
> next version of the file above it in the series.  This would have the
> consequence of making quilt dependent on patchutils.  Would this be
> acceptable?

No. filterdiff, interdiff etc. don't work for arbitrary patches; they use 
heuristics that fail once in a while. I don't want quilt to fail like that, 
particularly because it can do better. The pop cpmmand already has code to 
check whether a patch can be savely removed: it that creates a temporary copy 
of the files in the patch, applies the patch, and compares the result. That's 
not something you want to do when querying the patch status though. The only 
clean solution I can imagine is remembering the timestamps of all modified 
files, but that would require a number of changes here and there.

-- Andreas.