[Quilt-dev] Re: Additional checks in rpatch.in

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Thu, 2003-10-23 at 20:22, wangdi wrote:
> >  - I would very much like to get rid of the .pc/*/.pc files (the lists
> >    of files that a patch contains), and look into the backup
> >    directories instead. This would speed up things.
> >
>          I think  keeping the .pc/*/.pc  maybe  helpful to some  
> command, for example quilt files.
>          Some times, if some file (size = 0) in .pc/*/ has been deleted 
> , for example by make distclean.  If we keep
>          .pc/*/.pc file, we can recover the whole system.

`make distclean' should not mess around in .pc, but I see now that at
least the kernel distclean does. This really should be fixed in the
kernel makefile; in fact I don't see why it removes zero-size files at
all. A workaround would be to make .pc a symlink to a directory outside
the source tree.

The problems with .pc/*/.pc are:
  - The mechanism by which the file lists are generated does not exactly
    match the mechanism patch uses; it is just a heuristic. I would
    prefer to get rid of this heuristic, and let `patch' handle this.
  - The .pc files need to be kept up to date. The push command would
    become faster without them. The speed of `push' and `pop' is most
    important.
  - For most commands the .pc files don't provide a significant speedup.
    For `quilt files', a simple `find' would do, for example.


Cheers,
-- 
Andreas Gruenbacher <address@hidden>
SuSE Labs, SuSE Linux AG <http://www.suse.de/>