On 17.12.2019 14:58, Stefan Sperling wrote: > On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 08:33:09AM -0500, Doug Robinson wrote: >>> And of course, both the >>> filename and the label (= the part after the tab character) may contain an >>> arbitrary number of spaces. >> The problem is parsing the line into proper tokens when every character out >> there can be part of the file name. There must be a structure to the field >> or parsing is not really parsing anymore. > The output of 'svn diff' was not designed with 'svn patch' in mind. > The diff command preceded the patch command by many years. > > I still believe that making --patch-compatible produce filenames without > any trailing annotations in the output of 'svn diff' is the best answer.
Agreed. Plain-vanilla BSD patch should be able to apply such patches, as should 'svn patch'. > This whole discussion started off with the problem statement that the > --patch-compatible option produces a diff which cannot be applied after > tabs are replaced with spaces. > > This filename parsing problem isn't limited to 'svn patch'. Other patch > implementations might run into the same problem. The way 'svn patch' finds > the filename is based on Larry Wall's original patch program. Precisely. That TAB *is* the canonical delimiter. The (implicit) specification is decades old, and it would be an error to try to second-guess it at this point. Designing a stricter universal format for transmitting contextual changes is a different matter entirely, one that we tried to tackle in the past and failed; other version control systems tried and failed, too. It would be a nice thing to have, but it's hardly something this community can do in isolation. > Generally, patches being mangled in transit is a notorious problem especially > with web-based email. It's not really a safe format for this purpose. If > patches > get changed in transit in any way there is no guarantee they will apply > cleanly. > That's not a new problem, it's a long-standing issue. And it's not > SVN-specific. > There is already a way to transfer changes without such problems: svn commit And note that the tabs-to-spaces headache doesn't stop with parsing the filename out of the header, it affects the filename itself. I can put tabs in a filename on most Unix filesystems ... that would probably break even the original patch tool. -- Brane
