Re: Patch and Cygwin

[Lennart Borgman <lennart dot borgman dot 073 at student dot lu dot se>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> What's wrong with the patched file having CRLF on Windows?
>  
It is the default line endings on Windows so normally that is what you 
want. However if you have a file with LF line endings instead then don't 
you probably have that for a reason? I can of course not know the 
reason, but I guess there is some.

I am not for example convinced that all cvs implementations on Windows 
can handle that a checked out file has got changed line end format. In 
fact I believe I have read that they can not, but I am not sure here 
either. In any case it seems better to try to avoid problems.

> But why should I care about these strange combinations on Windows?
> Why isn't it enough that patching Unix-style files with Unix-style
> patch files works (using --binary) and preserves the EOL type, and
> patching DOS-style files with DOS-style patch files also works?
>  
I do not know if you should care, but I do. It just happened to me that 
things did not work because of one of these other non-working 
combinations did occur for me. I did not first understand what happened. 
I thought that maybe the file to patch had changed and not until I got a 
message from others that the patch worked for them did I think of the 
problem with CR-LF/LF. (The patch file to my surprise had LF endings. In 
my opinion this should not have happened. I got a bit fooled by Emacs here.)

Now these surprising situations may take a lot of time when you got into 
them. Especially for someone not used to them. As you surely know I am 
trying to get more people on Windows to use Emacs and my interest in 
patch and Cygwin comes out of this. Those people I think of are Windows 
users. Maybe they have a long background in computers, but that does not 
help very much when there is too many things that just does not work 
out-of-the-box.

> Why the perfectionism?  If the usual cases work so well, why do we
> want to insist on looking for trouble at all costs?
>  
I hope it is not perfectionism. If you like me do many different things 
with a computer you are likely to get into cases like those I have as 
test cases. I can hardly touch a computer without finding something that 
does not work on it ;-)


> Because I can find no other explanation for the fact that the test
> that failed for you worked for me.  Maybe you should try installing
> all the utilities again, make sure what Diff and what Patch runs in
> each command, and see whether gnuwin32-test.cmd indeed fails for you.
>  
Could we be misunderstanding each other? Which test case worked for you 
but failed for me?

> I didn't run the shell scripts because
> there's no GnuWin32 port of Bash, and because I didn't want to mix the
> Diff/Patch issue with the shell behavior.
>  
checkresults.sh just reads the output from the test and presents that in 
a condensed manner. It could be run from most shells I believe (but the 
test for ^M is perhaps a bit weak ...)

> That will not be easy using the techniques you tried in sh-tests, I
> suspect.  Perhaps "od -c" is a good start.
>  
You are right, I will try something else.

Thanks for the answers.

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