Re: [gentoo-dev] to patch or sed was -> repoman and checking for correct quoting

[William L. Thomson Jr.]

On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 18:36 +0100, Bo Ørsted Andresen wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 11:51:37AM +0100, Krzysiek Pawlik wrote:
> > It's purpose is to remove the ${D} from makefile, additionally ${D} is in single
> > quotes, so it will not be expanded - is it a bug in repoman check?
>
> What ${D} ? I see none in that makefile. Which is why I think a patch would be
> better in this case. A patch would actually tell you when half of the
> substitutions don't match anything... I think this is a point worth making even
> if it doesn't change your point.

I have kinda gone back and forth between patches and sed. While I agree
patches are better since they fail to apply at times. Sed stuff can be
more portable amongst revisions, as I have found with maintaining assp.
Where the patch grew to the point it had to be mirrored :(.

Now I know some will scream, puke, throw up in their mouth, and so on.
But seems like sed should have an OPTIONAL argument or etc to tell sed
to either fail if it can't make the change anywhere. And/or keep/output
a count of how many things were modified.

Wrt to assp, how I am presently using it, is on a rev bump or etc. I
will have to ebuild run it's sed. Then I will diff the installed version
that was sed during merge with the original. Then review that diff/patch
to make sure all was modified per the sed. If not address the sed. Once
the resulting diff/patch is what it would be if I were using a patch.
Then I commit the ebuild.

Where I had to make a patch per assp version. The above technique
allowed me to rip through testing 3 different versions with the same sed
for each. Verses having to make 3 different patches for each. It seems
much faster and way more ideal.

There is still the possibility of sed failing. But since I rule that out
before commit. Once committed chance of it failing is pretty nill. Not
to mention no external files. Less to maintain. less for users to sync,
download, etc.

It's a really hard call, but for most single line modifications. These
days I am really leaning toward sed vs patches.

-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.
Gentoo/Java