Re: diffutils file mode (was Re: [PATCH 5.15 00/37] 5.15.96-rc2 review)

[Linus Torvalds]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 12:20 PM Paul Eggert <eggert@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Thanks for pointing this out. I added this to our list of things to do,
> by installing the attached patch to the GNU diffutils TODO file. If this
> patch's wording isn't right, please let me know, as I haven't read this
> whole email thread, just the three emails sent directly to me.

Looks good to me.

The whole thread isn't actually any more interesting, it was mainly a
lot of "how did the bits get lost" confusion because it wasn't clear
whether it was some local script or quilt or whatever that lost sight
of the executable bit.

It starts with a report about how the lost bit results in a build error at

   https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/adc1b0b7-f837-fbb4-332b-4ce18fc55709@xxxxxxxxxxxx/

and there's discussion about how this has happened before and how our
kernel Makefiles generally should try to not execute scripts directly
exactly because our ancient "tarballs and patches" model never
supported the executable bit etc.

So none of it is very relevant, except in the sense that it would be
convenient if diffutils did support the executable bit changes and we
wouldn't have these kinds of things happening every once in a blue
moon.

Again - there are multiple different workarounds, ranging from "we
shouldn't do that then in our makefiles" to "you can use 'git diff'
instead in the quilt scripts".

So not a huge deal - but it would just be nice if diffutils just
supported the extended format.

           Linus