Subject: patch(1) long option handling
To: None <tech-userlevel@NetBSD.org>
From: dieter roelants <dieter.NetBSD@pandora.be>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 10/29/2006 17:50:19
Hi,

I have just filed PR bin/34938. To summarize, it seems that long option handling in patch(1) doesn't work for (some) options which take an argument. For example, the man page claims that --directory does the same as -d. In reality nor --directory dir nor --directory=dir does. Attached to the PR is a patch which makes --long-option=arg work[1]. I also modified the man page to reflect this for --directory and --fuzz. Before I check other options, I'd like to know if people think if this is the right thing to do or if we should rather replace the option parsing with some getopt_long. I think that will break using a '+' to change options for subsequent patches, though.

[1] This makes it more compatible with GNU patch, which is what I needed to make pkgsrc/devel/meld[2] show CVS (and probably other SCM) diffs.
[2] agc, next time you're looking for a package of the month, you might want to consider meld :)

Kind regards
dieter