Re: [bug-patch] patch cannot handle >3 lines of context

[Andreas Grünbacher]

Jörn,

2015-07-18 21:04 GMT+02:00 Jörn Engel <address@hidden>:
> Not sure how to interpret your answer.  Given that git or a human can
> apply the patch just fine, I would consider it a legal patch.

Yes, kind of. It's not a patch that a tool would produce though.

> As such, I would be unhappy about an answer that implied "there
> is no bug". An answer of "this is hard, send a patch if you care"
> would be fine.  I had a brief look at the code and decided to work
> on something else instead.

I have tried removing this heuristic in the past. The result was lots
of misapplied patches. I couldn't think of a better heuristic either.
Changing these kinds of things is difficult: for example, distributions
are using patch for applying hundreds of thousands of patches
automatically during package builds. These kinds of mis-applied
patches are relatively likely not to not lead to subsequent errors
(like syntax errors in a C file).

Andreas