[Heads up] BSD-licensed patch becoming the default RSN.

[Jan Beich]

Pedro Giffuni <pfg at FreeBSD.org> writes:

> Now, just some food for thought, but if you are unsure your patch
> applies cleanly, why would you choose to use the -s (silent) option?

Because by default patch(1) is overly verbose. At first, I'm only
interested if a patch applies cleanly, then what files fail to apply.
To fix the patch I just repeat over edit a hunk (or two) and confirm
patch(1) no longer rejects it.

With -Cs giving up is easy at any time. One may not care about
a failed hunk in a man page or prefer to edit a patch as the whole
instead of on per-file (.rej file) basis.

> It would seem to me that some people may want the -s option to be
> truly silent (those paths may be long) and since those .rej files are
> not
> really being created it is consistent not to list them.

If you need -s to be truly silent then you're probably writing a script.
At which point -C being a BSD extension and -s behaving differently from
GNU patch would make more pain than not using them.

A new option may be better e.g.,

     -q, --quiet
            Do not write anything to standard output. Exit immediately
            with non-zero status if any hunk fails to apply.