combinediff should accept an arbitrary number of files

[jamesderlin]

splitdiff is able to split a single patch file into multiple (potentially many) patch files. combinediff is able to combine exactly two patch files.

Why is combinediff not a proper inverse of splitdiff? I think that using combinediff to undo the work of splitdiff ought to be straightforward, but it instead seems awkward:

touch combined.tmp
for i in *.patch; do
  combinediff combined.tmp "$i" > combined.tmp.new
  mv -f combined.tmp.new combined.tmp
done
mv combined.tmp combined.patch

I need to:

1. Create an empty file as the initial running result.
2. Use a shell for loop, which I usually try to avoid.
3. Since I want to write to the same file I'm reading from, I need to pipe output to a temporary file first (or use sponge from moreutils).

(Is there a better way?)

It would be much nicer if combinediff accepted an arbitrary number of files on the command-line and expected them to be in order. For non-overlapping patches, I then could simply use combinediff *.

I'm using patchutils 0.4.2.

[jamesderlin]

Oh, if all of the patches are non-overlapping, I could just cat them all together.

[sergiomb2]

hello , one day I'd like have time to fix some of these legit issues and also document some important features .
but now I have a doubt , where do I find a "a patch file composed of several incremental patches" ?, or what is a "a patch file composed of several incremental patches" ?

[lxop]

The first thing I can think of for a patch composed of several incremental patches is combining Linux kernel patches: if I want to see the difference between kernel 5.10 and 5.15, I need to combine patch-5.11, patch-5.12, patch-13, patch-14, and patch-15. I'm trying to do this at the moment using shell redirection:

combinediff <(combinediff patch-5.11 patch-5.12) patch-5.13

or

combinediff patch-5.11 patch-5.12 | combinediff - patch-5.13

but it is not working properly for me - while I do get output, I also get an error message

combinediff: hunk-splitting is required in this case, but is not yet implemented
combinediff: use the -U option to work around this

and the patches aren't properly merged. The -U suggestion doesn't help.

[jamesderlin]

but now I have a doubt , where do I find a "a patch file composed of several incremental patches" ?, or what is a "a patch file composed of several incremental patches" ?

I'm not sure what you're quoting since my original comment didn't mention anything about "incremental patches". I'm simply requesting that combinediff be able to easily undo splitdiff.