GNU patch - News: Upcoming stable release

Upcoming stable release

Item posted by Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen> on Mon 06 Apr 2009 05:07:50 PM UTC.

The code should be feature complete for the next stable release with only a few minor bugfixes left in the queue.  This is your chance to report more bugs that still need to be addressed.  Please expect the next stable release to happen in about a month's time.

The following user visible changes have been made:

• A regression test suite has been added ("make check").
• A -m or --merge option has been added which will merge a patch file into the original files similar to merge(1).  See the patch(1) manual page for documentation.
• Unless a filename has been specified on the command line, look only for filenames in the patch until one has been found.  This prevents patch from tripping over garbage that isn't a patch.  When conforming to POSIX, this behavior is turned off and patch will ask for a filename if none is found.
• 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.
• Backup files for nonexisting files are now created with default permissions rather than with mode 0: backup files with mode 0 were causing problems with applications which do not expect unreadable files.
• The -B, -Y, and -z options (--prefix, --basename-prefix, --suffix) now imply the simple version control mode, and can be combined.
• Patch rejects more malformed normal format commands and checks for trailing garbage.  It now recognizes ed commands without addresses.

Please see the project's bug tracker for a list of known issues before reporting those things again on the mailing list.  (Postponed bugs are not going to be addressed in the next stable release.)