Re: [RFC] patch's default backup behavior

On 11/04/2022 17:58, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> Personally, if YOU like the behavior of gnu patch, by all means,
> please USE gnu patch.  Please do NOT make bsd patch behave in
> a different manner simply because you personally like that
> other behavior.
> 
> If you want the stuff to look like Linux/GNU by all means,
> go RUN linux/gnu!!!!

There are two opinions that as almost invariably wrong, in any context:

  - Popular thing X does Y, therefore Y is good.
  - Popular thing X does Y, therefore Y is bad.

This thread started with 'popular thing X does Y, we do Z, let's 
evaluate which is better'.  Reducing that to 'popular thing X does Y, 
therefore we should do Z, if you want Y then you should run X' is 
unhelpful.  It is also how we end up in a situation where everyone runs 
X and we sit around wondering where all of our users and contributors went.

We should neither adopt or discard a particular behaviour in patch on 
the basis that GNU patch does it.  We should use the fact that GNU patch 
does it to gather data on whether it's a desirable behaviour.  We should 
adopt their good ideas and avoid their bad ideas.

That is precisely the process that Kyle is trying to drive and the 
FreeBSD system will be better as a result of his work.  Personally, I 
hate having .rej and .orig files scattered over my filesystem as a 
result of patch failing and I end up having to write a `find` command to 
delete them all.  Does that mean that I want to give up kqueue, 
capsicum, out-of-the-box ZFS, a sane /dev/dsp, jails, clang as the 
system compiler, a `tar` that knows that `x` means 'extract the thing, 
you don't need me to duplicate the information in the file header to 
know what it is', and so on and run GNU/Linux?  No.

I take Joerg's point that GNU patch *sometimes* creating them makes 
tooling difficult.  I would be quite happy with a solution that they are 
created unconditionally with a flag to disable creating them (I would 
then `alias patch="patch --do-not-leave-stuff-on-my-filesystem"` in my 
`.profile` and forget about it for interactive use) or that they are 
never created with a flag to enable creating them, which I would never 
pass except when working with bits of infrastructure that explicitly 
want the .orig files.

David