On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 12:26:28AM +0200, Miklos Vajna wrote: > The original note probably wanted to suggest "edit the patch with care", > but actually suggested just editing the first characters on certain > lines, which is a pretty bad suggestion. The intent of "-e" is to pick and choose lines of the diff to apply, or even to munge the lines. So it is safe to: - remove lines with a '+' (don't stage the addition) - munge any lines with a '+' (stage modified contents) - add lines with a '+' (stage an addition) - convert lines with a ' ' to '-' (stage removal) - convert lines with a '-' to ' ' (don't stage removal) It is a bad idea to: - delete '-' lines - delete ' ' lines - add ' ' or '-' line - munge the contents of ' ' or '-' lines But that is just off the top of my head; perhaps others can come up with corner cases where one of the safe things breaks. > -*NOTE*: Obviously, if you change anything else than the first character > -on lines beginning with a space or a minus, the patch will no longer > -apply. > +*NOTE*: Obviously, if you change the first characters of the lines or > +lines beginning with a space or a minus, the patch will no longer apply. So this is warning about changing or deleting ' ' or '-' lines, which is good. But you can change the first characters of those lines, but only by interchanging the two. So I think both the previous text and your text don't cover all cases. Maybe it makes sense instead to do a quick overview of what is OK and what is not (like the list above). -Peff -- To unsubscribe from this list: 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