CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitversion-control
R.D.
R.D.

Reputation: 2631

What is the point of patching patchfiles?

I work with a software vendor who generally distributes code as git am-like patches in .patch files, which works reasonably well.

Occasionally, instead of providing a commit as a patch file, which patches a source file (i.e. .c), they tend to patch up one of the older patch files.

In case it's not clear what I'm describing, the diff often looks like this:

second.patch:

diff --git a/first.patch b/first.patch
index 4a2f020..2ea53fe 100644
--- a/first.patch  #notice this isn't a source file, but rather a older patch provided
+++ b/second.patch
 <whatever>

I'd assume there should be a very good reason, since they do it very rarely, and it's very annoying.

To me, I see a huge downside of having to maintain older .patch files to apply the new one, which should be completely unnecessary.

Is there a reason why one would do this?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 57

Answers (1)

R.D.
R.D.

Reputation: 2631

Turns out it's their way of doing git commit --amend so that they don't actually modify the older patch files

Upvotes: 1

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