troubles patching kernel source

phil-news-nospam_at_ipal.net
Date: 07/29/04 

Date: 29 Jul 2004 06:44:32 GMT

I'm trying to make some patches that can apply to the kernel source.
In certain contexts they work fine. In others they don't work at all
(even with the same version of kernel freshly extracted from the same
exact tarball). The errors are that the file to be patched is not
found. But there are some inconsistent behaviours with the patch
program that I need to work out. I've tried various values for -p and
the problems persist and don't seem to vary with changing -p so it
seems not to be a -p issue. Still, I'd like to know exactly what value
is standardly used for -p when applying patches to the kernel, such as
either -p0 or -p1. Knowing that I can avoid making a wrong solution
to the other problem (I don't want to end up solving it in a way that
is inconsistent with usual practices).

The kind of silliness I'm running into with patch is that sometimes it
refuses to patch saying file not found (the file to be patched) even
though the file is there, but sometimes it works when the file is the
first one in the patch file, and other times it works when the file is
the second one. This not leading to any clear direction on how to set
up multiple source trees where original and edited source can be compared
to produce correct patch files. It seems the correct way would be to
have the old file be the first one and the new file be the second one
when running diff to make the patchfile. But today it's not working
that way (yesterday it did). Today it tries to patch the 2nd file but
yesterday it tried to patch the 1st file. I think patch is trying to
be "too smart" and getting it wrong.

How do you organize your source trees in order to make a diff for patch? 

-- 
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| Phil Howard KA9WGN       | http://linuxhomepage.com/      http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/   http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
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