GNU patch - News: GNU patch: upcoming stable release; call for testing

GNU patch: upcoming stable release; call for testing

Item posted by Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen> on Mon 03 May 2010 10:37:52 PM UTC.

I am pleased to announce that there is progress towards the next stable release of GNU patch.  This is a call for testing so that things will work as expected, on as many platforms as possible.

The upcoming release will include several new features:

• Support for most features of the "diff --git" format: renames and copies, permission changes, symlink diffs.  (Binary diffs are not supported yet; patch will complain and skip them.)
• Support for double-quoted filenames: when a filename in a context diff starts with a double quote, it is interpreted as a C string literal.  The escape sequences \\, \", \a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v, and \ooo (a three-digit octal number between 0 and 255) are recognized.
• Refuse to patch read-only files by default, or at least warn when patching such files with --force or --batch.
• Refuse to apply a normal patch to a symlink.  (Previous versions of patch were wrongly replacing the symlink with a regular file.)
• When a timestamp specifies a time zone, honor that instead of assuming the local time zone (--set-date) or Universal Coordinated Time (--set-utc).
• Support for nanosecond precision timestamps.

Behind the scenes, some infrastructure changes have happened as well: the project now uses GNU Automake, and the previous, static copy of the Gnulib library has been replaced by a git submodule.

The project home with the development repository, bug tracker, and bug-patch@gnu.org mailing list archive is located at:

  http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/patch

Development snapshots will be made available on:

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/patch/

Previous stable releases are available at:

  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/patch/

Please send bug reports or suggestions to <bug-patch@gnu.org>.