> I have just patched my 0.8.3 tree to 0.8.4 using the (tiny)
> patch provided. I was unable to compile 0.8.4 in this way
> because after the patch aclocal.m4 was out of date and
> my system was not string enough to make it. I got 0.8.4
> to compile by 'touch'ing aclocal.m4.
Did the patch modify "aclocal.m4"?
If not, future patches should modify generated files as well.
If so, perhaps it did so *before* modifying "acinclude.m4", thus giving
"acinclude.m4" a later mod time than "aclocal.m4", and making "make"
think it had to rebuild "acinclude.m4" - about all we can do about that
is to, when generating the patch file, make sure the patch stuff
for source files comes before the patch stuff for generated files, so
that generated files are patched after the source files are.
(Of course, if you've modified the source file in such a way that the
derived file has to be re-generated, i.e. the patch file doesn't
correctly fix the version of the derived file generated from the
modified source file, that will do the wrong thing - but, at this point,
I'm not certain that it's *possible* to have a patch do the right thing
in all cases, so we probably just have to choose who we're going to
shaft, and, given the choice between shafting people who *haven't*
modified the source and are downloading patches because it takes less
time than downloading the entire new release, and shafting people who
have patched versions of the source and aren't using CVS, either
anonymous or non-anonymous, I suspect there are more of the former than
the latter, and they're probably less likely to be happy about the patch
not Just Working, so....)