Basic Diff question

[Fernan Aguero]

+----[ MC <rossiya at gmail.com> (18.Sep.2006 19:47):
|
| Hello
| 
| I am getting going on my second port.  However in this new one are many
| little patches
| to most of the source code.  I always see '.orig' suffixes appended to in
| Freebsd diff files, like
| 
| --- Src/DasherCore/FileLogger.cpp.orig Tue Jan 17 01:41:44 2006
| +++ Src/DasherCore/FileLogger.cpp Tue Jan 17 01:51:33 2006
| 
| but for the life of me I don't know a way to produce these '.orig' suffixes
| in the patch file other than
| hand editing.  
+----]

cp file file.orig
edit file, fix things, hack away, and when you're done
diff -u file.orig file

will produce the kind of output you see all over the place
in the FreeBSD repo.

Using .orig it's just a matter of taste ... you can follow
what most freebsd people do ... but you can use .bak, .old
or whatever you want, provided you supply the old/bak/orig
file first to diff ...

The thing is that having the old file associated with '---' and
the new file with '+++' makes one more comfortable, as
things that got added in the new version of the file will
get labeled by diff as '+', and things that got deleted in
the new version will be shown as present in the old version (as '-').

Hope this makes it clearer for you,

Fernan