Patch and Cygwin

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>]

This is a summary of my tests with Cygwin patch and different line 
ending styles. (Only LF and CRLF are tested here.)

I have downloaded patch 2.5.9 from 
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/diffutils/patch-2.5.9.tar.gz and compiled it 
using Cygwin. I have used this patch and the patch that currently comes 
with Cygwin to do some tests of patch and diff when the files to compare 
and patch have different line ending styles. I have also made this test 
using MSYS and GnuWin32 utilities.

The result is that the only option that seems to be able to handle the 
mix of line endings is Cygwin using DOS line endings with patch 2.5.9. 
(The only thing that did not work was preservation of line endings in 
the patched file, but that seems to be a small problem here.)

To see more of the result see here: 
http://ourcomments.org/GNU/patchcrlf/readme.txt


Lennart Borgman wrote:

> After finishing the installation of gcc-core (which includes binutils 
> as far as I understand) configure + make ran fine. I have now patch 
> 2.5.9 compiled for Cygwin I believe. Or?
>
> My intention was to look at the source code and see how it handles 
> line endings. I do not know if that is realistic though. As I said 
> before what I want it to do is:
>
> 1) Keep the line end style for the patched file.
>
> 2) Read the patch file and apply it even if it uses a different line 
> end style.
>
> This is simply what I expect of a text oriented tool. Comments and 
> help are welcome! (But please no holy war on line end style. That is 
> just improductive.)