GNU patch - News: New alpha release

New alpha release

Item posted by Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen> on Sun 22 Mar 2009 03:22:01 PM UTC.

The purpose of this alpha release is to allow people to test changes which will eventually end up in the next stable release.

The following user visible changes have been made:

• A regression test suite has been added ("make check").
• Unless a filename has been specified on the command line, look only for filenames in the patch until one has been found.  Start looking for hunks only after that.  This prevents patch from tripping over garbage that isn't a patch.
• Reject more malformed normal format commands and check for trailing garbage.  Recognize ed commands without addresses.
• All reject files have file name headers, which allows to use them as regular patches.
• When a patch file modifies the same file more than once, patch makes sure it backs up the original version of the file, rather than any intermediary versions.
• In the above situation, if there are rejects in more than one of those patches, the rejects are appended to the same reject file (rather then overwriting themselves).
• The -r option works correctly even there are rejects in more than one file.  Use the - argument to discard rejects.
• Rejected hunks come out in unified diff format if the input patch was of that format, otherwise in ordinary context diff form.  Use the --reject-format option to enforce either "context" or "unified" format. The "diff -p" (--show-c-function) output is preserved. Changed lines in context format reject files are correctly indicated with '!' markers as the format defines.  Added and removed lines are still marked with '+' and '-', respectively.
• The file permissions of reject files are no longer set to match the files they modify.  Instead, they retain the default permissions.  This is consistent with reject files to which rejects of multiple files may be written (-r option).
• The --binary option disables the heuristic for stripping CRs from line endings in patches.  This allows to preserve CRs even in mangled patches, or in patches generated without the --binary option on non-POSIX systems.

More fixes and improvements are pending.  Please see the project's bug tracker for a (so far incomplete) list of known issues before reporting those things again on the mailing list.