[ On Saturday, January 18, 2003 at 10:57:19 (+0900), Toru TAKAMIZU wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Patches from GNATS db broken
>
> Thank you for your step by step explanation -- this is not an irony,
> I mean it! But unfortunately, even if you use NetBSD's "ftp" the
> problem remains. I had already tried wget and got the same result.
> I diff'd the files between "ftp"'s and wget's. No difference.

I really didn't expect any difference between the data when retrieved by
ftp or wget -- I really only suggested ftp because it is available in
the base system.

> The problem looks the same as misc/4642 (as Dave Huang suggested).
> I had said "white spaces", but it's wrong, I guess. This problem seems
> to be caused by "blank lines" - what Dave used.
> 
> Sorry, I had misunderstood the problem itself and called "white spaces".

Ah ha!  Yes, I think I'm beginning to understand the problem you're
seeing better too!  It looks as though every blank line has been turned
into two blank lines.

I guess this is happening in the CGI script which generates the HTML
from the output of the underlying GNATS query-pr program (i.e. in
query-pr-single.pl).  It's really very frustrating that NetBSD doesn't
publish all the support files that are used to manage the project
(eg. in the same way FreeBSD does).  If all the code and configuration
files were available it would probably be much easier to diagnose this
problem.

In the mean time one hack which might work for at least many patches
would be to filter the edited file through sed '/./,/^$/!d', which
squeezes multiple blank lines down into only one blank line.

Perhaps better than fixing this bug at the source though would be adding
a CGI option that would spit out the raw output instead of dressing it
all up with fancy HTML...  eg:

	http://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=19257&raw=1

(not as good as providing anonymous read-only access directly to the
GNATS database, or a regularly updated copy of the DB, mind you...  :-)

> > ideally you
> > want to extract the patches from the copy of the PR that's forwarded to
> > the netbsd-bugs mailing list.  That's the copy which is least likely to
> > have been damaged in transit and it has gone through the fewest layers
> > of software.
> 
> I see. Thanks again.

Unfortunately the second patch in the e-mail message included in the
audit trail of PR#19257 was not forwarded to the netbsd-bugs mailing
list.  :-(

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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