Re: [patch@35055] vms.c rmsexpand refactor

On Dec 7, 2008, at 11:35 PM, John E. Malmberg wrote:

> Craig A. Berry wrote:
>> I will look at these, test them, and -- if all goes well -- apply  
>> them, but it's likely to take me a while to get to them.  In  
>> general I agree with the principle that routines that can be called  
>> very early in start-up before thread context is initialized do need  
>> to be cautious about trying to access that context.  I will just  
>> make a preliminary comment that it's very hard to see what's going  
>> on by reading the patches because they consist mostly of changes to  
>> non-significant whitespace.
>
> Thanks for looking at these.

I'm glad to look at them and hope to get a version I can apply.

> It may be easier to apply the patches and then compare the results  
> against the unpatched vms.c manually.

Not really, and that's not something a committer should be asked to do  
anyway.  I've just spent over an hour trying to get this series of six  
"refactor" patches to apply, but no luck.  There were six separate  
patches for pathify_dirspec, unixify, unixpath, vmsify, fileify, and  
rmsexpand.  Here and there a hunk succeeded but most did not.  The  
hunks that did apply had hundreds of lines of offset, indicating  
something's missing.

I fiddled with the order in which I applied them, used -l, and spent  
some time trying to figure out what was what before giving up.  Any  
manual attempt to sort out what was going on was pretty much sunk by  
having hundreds of lines consisting only of non-significant whitespace  
changes -- consider using diff -b.

I look forward to a revised patch that applies cleanly and does not  
introduce new test failures.

________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[email protected]

"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
  difficult than getting in."
                  Brad Leithauser