On 06-08-2022 08:55, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:

+If your package has a bug that takes multiple lines to fix,

I don't think this is true for replacing all instances of "foo"
by 
"/gnu/store/.../bin/foo" in a file.

Should it?

I don't think so. Directly substituting all the instances instead of
first writing a patch that does "foo" -> "@foo@" or such seems
simpler to me.  This might be a bit too nit-picky though, maybe it's
clear from context that this is not the kind of fix meant by that
line.

I'm struggling to see the issue here.  For starters, it doesn't take
multiple lines to embed a store path, the change usually happens on a
single line.  Of course, translating this into a substitute*, you
expand this single line into multiple ones, but that's not what is
meant here.

I was thinking of files that contain multiple instances of "foo" (usually on multiple lines) to be replaced by "/gnu/store/.../bin/foo", not files were a "foo
bar" was broken over multiple lines and it needs to be replaced by "/gnu/store/.../bin/foo
bar".

At least for the former, I don't think an intermediate "@foo@" is useful (with some exceptions, when a pattern match would catch too much).

The latter could in principle happen, but it doesn't seem to happen in practice.

Greetings,
Maxime.