[Quilt-dev] Recent improvements

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

Hello,

I recently found the time to add a number of small features to quilt
which I was missing now and then.  I will summarize them here, so that
they won't stay unnoticed.

VERSIONED META-DATA

The meta-data directory (usually, .pc/ in the root of the working tree)
is now versioned, so that meta-data directories can be updated when
incompatible changes in the meta-data format become necessary. When
quilt sees an old meta-data directory it requests to run the (new)
update command, which converts the meta-data to the latest version.

CONFIGURATION FILE

~/.quiltrc (or the configuration file specified with the --quiltrc
option) has been simplified. Some settings have been replaced by command
line options. In exchange, default command line options can now be
specified in .quiltrc per command. Configuration files can now contain
the following settings (old configuration files will continue to work):

 - QUILT_PATCHES (default: "patches"), the directory relative to the
   root of the working tree where patches are found,

 - QUILT_DIFF_OPTS (default: undefined) for passing options to GNU
   diff,

 - QUILT_PATCH_OPTS (default: undefined) for passing options to GNU
   patch,

 - QUILT_PATCHES_PREFIX (default: undefined; see below), and

 - QUILT_${COMMAND}_ARGS for passing default arguments to a command.

PATCHES NAMES IN STATUS MESSAGES

I often found myself adding the path to the directory that contains the
patches when cutting and pasting patch names from quilt's messages. With
the QUILT_PATCHES_PREFIX option, quilt will now report the relative path
from the working directory to the patches directory when reporting patch
names. Depending on your feedback, this may stay an option, or become the
default behavior.

CONTEXT STYLE DIFF AND NUMBER OF CONTEXT LINES IN PATCHES

The diff and refresh commands now support the -u, -U num, -c, and -C num
options of GNU diff. This allows to generate context style patches, and
patches with a custom number of context lines. These options are not
available in series files right now, so all patches will usually have
the same format. Is there a need to have these as per-patch options as
well?

DIFFSTAT

The refresh command now has a new --diffstat option. When this option is
given, patch statistics are added to the patch comments, and existing
statistics will be refreshed. (The diff command does not produce
statistics so far.)

SYNTAX HIGHLIGHTING

The diff command now can do syntax highlighting (--color option). By
adding --color=auto to QUILT_DIFF_ARGS in the configuration file, the
output will have syntax highlighting when writing to a console, and no
syntax highlighting when writing to a file (or pipe).

TODO (Martin? ;-)

Internally, I have switched to using printf instead of echo for messages. This 
is easier to handle long-term, because no shell expressions remain in the 
messages themselves; instead, arguments are expanded as printf arguments. I 
have updated the German translation, but I did not touch French. As a 
consequence, the French translation currently is in a very bad state.


Regards,
-- 
Andreas Gruenbacher <address@hidden>
SUSE Labs, SUSE LINUX AG