Re: Automatic generation of patches.

From: Paul Wallich (pw_at_panix.com)
Date: 10/31/03 

Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 13:18:01 -0500

Henrik Motakef wrote:

> hal9@cyberspace.org (Hal Niner) writes:
>
>
>>I'm looking for a automatic way of generating files that patch a live
>>running system. My idea is: I have (a) an old source code (b) a new
>>source code. Somehow I want to generate a file containing the
>>difference between (b) and (a) that can be (LOAD)ed into a running
>>lisp system. Ideally this file would containg only the minimal
>>changes needed to upgrade the live system.
>
>
> There is some diff-like stuff in the CMU AI repository that could be useful:
> <http://www-cgi.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/lang/lisp/code/tools/src_cmp/0.html>
>
> But that will only help you with finding differences in source code,
> for a useful patch you will need more. I doubt that an automatic
> solution can work reliably.

Fer example, you'd have to do some reasoning to capture changes in the
formats of data structures passed among functions and generate the
appropriate conversions. Alternately you could restrict "legal" changes
in source files to ones that could be handled by your patch system, but
that might not be satisfactory either.

paul

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