Re: Losing Patches (was: embedded target breakage)

[cgd at sibyte dot com]

jsm28@cam.ac.uk ("Joseph S. Myers") writes:
> On Sun, 1 Jul 2001, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> >  o However, if a patch has not been reviewed/installed for, say, two
> >    weeks, the submitter puts it into GNATS.
> 
> A related point: when putting a patch in GNATS, sending the URL to the
> patch in the list archives should suffice (and means any subsequent
> discussion on the lists can readily be reached from GNATS).  But we should
> have a ready means of getting the plain text version of a patch (with tabs
> intact, etc.) from the list archives.  That is, each list archive message
> ought to have links to a plain text version of the original message, and a
> plain text version but with MIME decoding done (to avoid problems with
> quoted-printable, etc.).  Yes, this would double or triple the size of the
> web list archives.

I requested plain-text copies of the archives a while ago, and was
told that it'd probably be Difficult.


My personal favorite way of doing this is:

* use lukemftp (ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/lukemftp/) or
another client that can fetch HTTP URLs to fetch (html-formatted)
messages from the list archives

* use a little script the one below, to convert the
commonly-troublesome entities back into normal text.

* apply resulting text with patch.  8-)


it's certainly not perfect, it's worked on all of the gcc, binutils,
etc. patches pulled from the list archives that i've tried.  I guess
i've managed to avoid quoted-printables.


chris
==============================================================================
#!/bin/sh
# $Id: dentify,v 1.2 2000/11/01 01:47:34 cgd Exp $

# Script to turn most commonly found HTML entities back into their
# ASCII forms, so that e.g. patches downloaded from mailing list archives
# on the web can be applied.
#
# Written by Chris G. Demetriou <cgd@netbsd.org>.  Public domain, but
# if you find it useful you're encouraged to buy me beer.

sed -e 's,&lt;,<,g' -e 's,&gt;,>,g' -e 's,&amp;,\&,g' "$@"