Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 13:48:29 +0200 From: Anton Berezin <tobez@tobez.org> To: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@starjuice.net> Cc: Stijn Hoop <stijn@win.tue.nl>, ports@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: The evils of Makefile-embedded perl scripts vs patches Message-ID: <20010815134829.B81696@heechee.tobez.org> In-Reply-To: <58526.997875545@axl.seasidesoftware.co.za>; from sheldonh@starjuice.net on Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 01:39:05PM %2B0200 References: <58425.997875060@axl.seasidesoftware.co.za> <58526.997875545@axl.seasidesoftware.co.za>
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On Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 01:39:05PM +0200, Sheldon Hearn wrote:
>
> [Was Re: Re: cvs commit: ports/games/freeciv ...]
>
> On Wed, 15 Aug 2001 13:31:00 +0200, Sheldon Hearn wrote:
> > What's wrong with it is that the Makefile isn't a place that folks
> > expect to find patches. People expect to find patches in the files
> > directory, names patch-*. Properly stored patches are also easier
> > to submit back to the vendor.
> Also, embedded perl scripts tend not to error out on failure to find a
> match. This means it's far too easy for the perl script to become
> stale.
> This was a perfect example. The perl script did absolutely _nothing_
> useful any more. A patch file would have failed to apply, which would
> help the maintainer keep things tidy.
It is not difficult to account for this situation in a perl one-liner:
perl -i -pe 's/something/something else/' some_file
should become
perl -i -pe 's/something/something else/ && $n++; END { exit 1 unless $n }' some_file
The truth is that it seems nobody thought about this potential problem
before, and we were not doing this.
I maintain that for very simple patches it is still better to use
one-liners magic in a Makefile rather than creating full-blown patch
files. We just need to take into consideration the potential for these
one-liners to become stale over time.
=Anton.
--
May the tuna salad be with you.
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