On Nov 8, 2007 6:26 AM, Arthur David Olson <olsona@elsie.nci.nih.gov> wrote:

Here are proposed changes to eliminate the "P" macro from time zone source
(a first step in simplifying the code by assuming C99 compilers).

--ado

I tried to apply this as a patch and run into two problems.

The file names are not readily obvious to the patch program; the names it sees are /tmp/geta13002 and /tmp/getb13002 etc, rather than (say) date.c.
There should be a 2 characters (eg two blanks, or "! " or "+ ") at the start of each line, but by the time Gmail gets the message, there's a blank missing at the start of lines such as the #ifndef lines at the start of the patch below. I also had some unfortunate line-wrapping, but I'm willing to blame that on the (other) email program I use.
I tried manually fixing up the patch file for the line starts, but was not successful.

------- date.c -------
*** /tmp/geta13002 Thu Nov 8 09:23:34 2007
--- /tmp/getb13002 Thu Nov 8 09:23:34 2007
***************
*** 1,6 ****
#ifndef lint
#ifndef NOID
! static char elsieid[] = "@(#)date.c 8.2";
/*
** Modified from the UCB version with the SCCS ID appearing below.
*/
--- 1,6 ----
#ifndef lint
#ifndef NOID
! static char elsieid[] = "@(#)date.c 8.3";
/*
** Modified from the UCB version with the SCCS ID appearing below.
*/

Did anyone else run into parallel problems, or is it an artefact of the mix of environments I'm using?