Re: diff/patch incompatibility with -p and crlf

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Tuesday, 6 September 2005 19:00:20 Egmont Koblinger wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I found a strange incompatibility between diffutils 2.8.1 and patch 2.5.4.
> There's a special case when a patch generated by "diff" cannot be applied
> by "patch".
>
> If the file to be patched has DOS-style CR-LF newlines, and the "-p" option
> of diff is being used, then in the generated patch the "@@" lines will also
> end with CR-LF since a function name (a line of the source code which ends
> in a CR-LF) is copied there.
>
> When trying to apply such a patch, the patch utility, seeing that the "@@"
> line also ends in CR-LF, believes that the file should not contain CR's
> (maybe it was incorrectly transferred through ASCII FTP or similar channel)
> and automatically strips all the CR's from the file. And then applying the
> result will fail since important CR's are missing from the end of
> subsequent lines.
>
> I believe that "diff" is buggy, it should make sure not to put CR at the
> end of the "@@" lines.

This was actually fixed in patch by Paul Eggert after 2.5.9. The fix is here:

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/patch.git/commit/?id=12c0847f

The alpha version at ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/patch already incudes the fix. I 
have added a regression test now.

Andreas