On Tue, Sep 08 2009, Ben Finney wrote: > Paul Wise <p...@debian.org> writes:
>> What format do the other DVCS systems use for patch export? > > Bazaar users generate a “merge directive” for serialising a change set > <URL:http://bazaar-vcs.org/MergeDirective>. The merge directive is > metadata to be read by the ‘bzr merge’ command; it is commonly > accompanied in the same message by a plain-text ‘bzr diff’ output. That does not seem to be a good format for a patch scheme, since it is dependent on specialized code to implement it. >> Also, the git format-patch command can include encoded binary files, >> which I don't think patch(1) can handle. > > Right, all these serialisations are essentially supersets of what > ‘patch(1)’ can do, since they include things like removing files etc. True. But our use case would still have a simple patch in the body; we are mostly talking about the header fields and the preamble in the body. Post the signature separator, the contents are still a simple patch. The resulting format is _compatible_ with git format-patch and git am, but not identical. Seems to me that we have a widely used convention (which might not be universal) that will meet our needs, and at least seems compatible with a lot of software under distributed version control. I think it well behooves us to re-use this, rather than go off an reinvent the wheel ourselves and be incompatible with _everything_ else out there. manoj -- "No wife of *mine* is doing any dishes. That's what we had the kid for." from Deathlok comics #1 Manoj Srivastava <sriva...@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/> 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
