Patching and fuzz

Posted Jul 10, 2008 15:30 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Patching and fuzz by epa
Parent article: Rawhide users: brace for a new RPM

I think you're confusing fuzz and offsets. You only get fuzz if there are differences between the version you have and the version the patch was against in the 3 context lines around each change. My vague estimate is that, if a patch applies with fuzz, there's about even odds that the resulting code will work, versus being broken in some way. In particular, if there's a memory leak, and you make a patch to fix it, and the upstream adopts your patch, your patch will probably apply with fuzz and introduce a double-free bug.