Releasing unified diffs

[doktornotor]

Could someone please spend a couple of minutes explaining why the patchsets are not using unified diff format either by default, or why there is not an option to download the updates in that format? There are good reason why unidiff is a de-facto requirement when submitting patches to many open-source projects. This context stuff is a PITA to read and apply manually (required for more or less heavily modded boards).

Thanks.

[igorw]

I'm not trying to justify the lack of published diffs, but this can be easily generated from git. You do this by diffing two tags and limiting the diff to the phpBB subdirectory. You can pipe that to a file and run the patch.

Code: Select all

git diff release-3.0.8...release-3.0.9 -- phpBB

[doktornotor]

Well, doing something similar ATM... Was more like wondering why the unidiff format is not used instead of the context ones. Not really sure how many people end up patching files manually, however the current format sucks for that purpose and for readability as well.

[Oleg]

I think the idea is that "code changes" that we provide are targeted at people who can't read diffs. The people that can work with diffs can easily obtain them for themselves using any number of ways (e.g. diff released packages).

Edit: if we do provide diffs in context format then I have no idea why.

[doktornotor]

Edit: if we do provide diffs in context format then I have no idea why.

Yeah, the packages called *-patch.{zip,tar.bz2} only consist of context diffs. (diff -x images -crNEB)