Alecs' Blog Did you ever go clear..

Incremental Patch and Interdiff

ck always releases a full patch to major kernel version (like -stable kernel patches do). But kernel.org does provide incremental patch. And since ck refuses to use git to manage his tree (quilt, the small tool suits better for his small project, he says), whenever a new ck patch is out, you have to reverse the last patch (ie. 2.6.15-ck6) to the major version (ie. 2.6.15) and then apply the new patch (ie. 2.6.15-ck7). Sometimes a new ck patch just modifies very few files (Makefile to change its version and one or two small changes to a file or two). So it would be better if there's an incremental ck patch. This way there will be less compiling (since less file changed) assuming you dont do a 'make clean' every time you compile a new kernel.

Though you can view ck's ChangeLog and use quilt manually deleting/adding single patches, that needs extra work.

Searched a while and found a package called patchutils, in which there's a slick program 'interdiff' that can make incremental patch from two same originated patches. Put it another way, we can get the patch B->C from the patch A->B and A->C. It does support the -p option like the command patch. So to get a ck6->ck7 incremental patch, we can use the following command:

$ interdiff -p1 patch-2.6.15-ck6 patch-2.6.15-ck7 >ck6-ck7

Oh dude, thats kool.

13 Mar 2006

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