Hi Jean,
Thanks for the tip on adding those quilt options to the configuration file. I've done a quick experiment and it seems to work.
Hi Aidan,
On Fri, 2024-08-09 at 11:03 +0100, Aidan wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Aug 2024, 10:46 Jean Delvare, <jdelvare@suse.de> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2024-08-08 at 09:26 +0100, Aidan wrote:
> > > I need to use quilt for patch binary files, however, quilt rejects
> > > this.
> > >
> > > Is this a deliberate decision or does it just need implemented?
> >
> > This is a technical limitation. Quilt relies on GNU patch to apply the
> > patches and GNU diff to generate them. GNU diff doesn't support binary
> > files. I don't think GNU patch supports binary files either, the manual
> > page mentions a binary mode but I seem to understand it's only about
> > text file line ending conversion, not actual binary files.
>
> I believe GNU patch and diff do work with binary files.
> I've just tested this and it works:
>
> diff --binary --text binary1 binary2 > mypatch
>
> patch binary1 < mypatch
OK, this is news to me. Option --binary of GNU diff is undocumented (at
least in the versions I'm using, 3.6 and 3.10) so I'm not sure what it
does exactly. I suspect it simply avoids line end conversions,
similarly to what the GNU patch option does. If your binary files are
large, patches generated that way will be very large as well, as I
don't expect GNU diff to find any matching "line" so it will simply
include both files in their entirety in the patch.
I think you should also pass option --binary to GNU patch to be on the
safe side.
If the above commands work for the files you are dealing with, then you
may try adding the following to your ~/.quiltrc configuration file:
QUILT_PATCH_OPTS="--binary"
QUILT_DIFF_OPTS="--binary --text"
Maybe it will satisfy your need, but I can't promise anything.
--
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support