Re: Humble request

[Ilya Zakharevich <ilya@math.ohio-state.edu>]

Gerhard Niklasch writes:
> (2) It'll save me (and probably Karim) a few minutes' work if you do
> all your diffs from the distribution's base directory  (the one with the
> version number in its name).  Relative paths beginning with `./' are ok
> if `.' is the base dir, although I prefer them without that.  In this way,
> each and every diff you find there can be applied by calling `patch -l -p0'
> from the base directory  (`-p0' = `remove zero slashes and everything
> leading up to them from the path', i.e. use the given path).
> 
> If you want to be particularly nice about this, paste in your diff
> commandline as well.  (It's a bit redundant but I prefer to see the
> options.  Recursive diffs should do this automatically.)

Note that AFAIK the common practice is to do patches with -p1 option.
Then paths given to diff should either start with ./ (if done in
toplevel PARI directory), or done from a parent/kid directory to this
one, and start with pari-2.0.5.alpha/ or ../ correspondingly.

This is how I did my patches.  Note that doing it from the parent
directory (what I did not ;-) shows the version number as well.

> (4) Ilya, your diff utility seems to be acting up.  It frequently neglects
> to put a newline after the `@@<line numbers>@@' marker, and the first line
> of the current chunk then ends up on the same instead of on the following
> line of the diff.  Is there anything you could do about this?

Hmm, are you refering to me doing 

     diff -pu

?  -p option gives an important feedback about the fixed function
name, but some very old `patch'es do not grok it.  Upgrade.

Ilya