Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > 1. I feel like "-p1" was pretty standard even before Git. You'd > extract two copies of the tarball, one into "foo-1.2.3" and one > into "foo-1.2.3.orig", and then "diff -Nru" between them to send a > patch. I would too, but then we wouldn't have accepted the request to add .noprefix configuration; I do not recall where it came from. > 2. It feels weird that a maintainer who isn't using Git would expect a > lot of contributions from folks who are. And even weirder, that > they would insist that all of the folks sending patches set > diff.noprefix. > > So I won't say it's not possible (especially in some closed community). > But I'm skeptical. The scenario I would find more likely is a project established long before we were popular wants to keep using -p0 even after switching to use Git. > All that said, if "apply" and "am" could automatically figure out > and handle "-p0" patches, that would be a useful way to help > people. I'm just hesitant because it probably involves some heuristics. I am not all that interested in that direction, for exactly the same reason as I are heditant. Such a tool that outsmarts users will eventually bite them. > Yeah, I am as always a little concerned that one person's fix is another > one's regression. But it really just seems to that on balance people set > diff.noprefix with no thought at all to how it would affect format-patch > (in fact, I'd guess 99% of Git users do not use format-patch at all). > And then they are surprised (or worse, the receiver is surprised) when > it doesn't work. For these 99% users, if format-patch paid attention to their diff.noprefix and used -p0, the world would become even more interesting place. I am not sure this particular cure is an overall win. And as you mentioned elsewhere, a change that is deliberately designed to be breaking like this does not become much safer by cooking in 'next', which is another sad thing.
