---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: GNU patch: upcoming stable release; call for testing Date: Sunday 02 May 2010 From: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@xxxxxxx> To: info-gnu@xxxxxxx I am pleased to announce that there is progress towards the next stable release of GNU patch. This is a call for testing so that things will work as expected, on as many platforms as possible. The upcoming release will include several new features: * Support for most features of the "diff --git" format: renames and copies, permission changes, symlink diffs. (Binary diffs are not supported yet; patch will complain and skip them.) * Support for double-quoted filenames: when a filename in a context diff starts with a double quote, it is interpreted as a C string literal. The escape sequences \\, \", \a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v, and \ooo (a three-digit octal number between 0 and 255) are recognized. * Refuse to patch read-only files by default, or at least warn when patching such files with --force or --batch. * Refuse to apply a normal patch to a symlink. (Previous versions of patch were wrongly replacing the symlink with a regular file.) * When a timestamp specifies a time zone, honor that instead of assuming the local time zone (--set-date) or Universal Coordinated Time (--set-utc). * Support for nanosecond precision timestamps. Behind the scenes, some infrastructure changes have happened as well: the project now uses GNU Automake, and the previous, static copy of the Gnulib library has been replaced by a git submodule. The project home with the development repository, bug tracker, and bug- patch@xxxxxxx mailing list archive is located at: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/patch Development snapshots will be made available on: ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/patch/ Previous stable releases are available at: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/patch/ Please send bug reports or suggestions to <bug-patch@xxxxxxx>. Thanks, Andreas ------------------------------------------------------- -- 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