Hi, While working on an external git patch importer, I noticed that git patches can break silently when fed to vanilla patch. Take this hunk from the git tree: diff --git a/git-pull-script b/git-fetch-script similarity index 89% copy from git-pull-script copy to git-fetch-script index bd892c7..17f22af 100755 --- a/git-pull-script +++ b/git-fetch-script @@ -39,8 +39,3 @@ download_one "$merge_repo/$merge_name" " echo "Getting object database" download_objects "$merge_repo" "$(cat "$GIT_DIR"/MERGE_HEAD)" - -git-resolve-script \ - "$(cat "$GIT_DIR"/HEAD)" \ - "$(cat "$GIT_DIR"/MERGE_HEAD)" \ - "$merge_repo" git-apply would presumably create git-fetch-script by copying git-pull-script then deleting this hunk. Vanilla patch simply deletes the hunk from git-pull-script. This seems bad. Is there any reason why git diff shouldn't use --- a/git-fetch-script +++ b/git-fetch-script instead? On a related note, it'd be nice if the format allowed for some kind of representation of binary data. I had a half-baked idea that it could hold a line describing the encoding of the diff, eg encoding base64 which could indicate that the diff should be decoded as base64 before being applied. This could allow a patch to hold a binary file add, or wrap a binary diff, though it doesn't specify what form such a diff should take... thoughts? - : send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html