Easier Patch Submission? Is it possible?

[Michael Thomas]

Just to throw an idea out. One piece that makes submitting patches difficult
is patch file creation. Often patches are generated in-the-line-of-duty as
it were and then the change is submitted back to the community. Often the
temptation, at least for me, is to submit the raw edited file rather than a
cvs patch file. My question is why not? Why can't patch files be
automatically derived on submission of a complete file or on-the-fly
comparison on request.

The advantage of a complete file is context, a patch files shows only a
subset of the the file relating to the changes but not necessarily how it
relates to the rest of the code. The obvious disadvantage to whole file
submission having to submit files 1 to 1 instead of a single patch file
incorporating all changes. That however again is not per say a bad thing as
individual files could then be approved/denied. The main issue I can really
see is that there are no version tags within the files themselves. If those
version numbers were added it should be fairly trivial to automatically
generate the patch files against the corresponding base file.

Just a thought.
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