cygport no longer archives ${NAME}-${VERSION}-${RELEASE}.cygwin.patch into source package automatically

[Jon Turney]

On 27/11/2025 13:46, Takashi Yano via Cygwin wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Nov 2025 16:57:37 +0900
> Takashi Yano wrote:
>> One year ago, cygport archives ${NAME}-${VERSION}-${RELEASE}.cygwin.patch
>> into source package automatically. However, it does not seem to archive now.
>>
>> Is this intentional behaviour?

Yes.

I did some work a while ago to simplify the functionality this ancient 
and confusing mechanism provided.

Briefly, the .cygwin.patch file is applied to an empty ${C} directory to 
create a set of files. Cygwin READMEs, custom post-install/pre-remove 
scripts and shell profile scripts found in ${C} are then automatically 
installed (as per the "Postinstall" chapter in the cygport reference 
manual).

This is just strange, and kind of awkward to work with when building 
from a packaging repo, as you can't work directly with these files, only 
a patch which makes them.

So I added a new mechanism where these files can be named in CYGWN_FILES 
and are directly included in the source archive, instead.

[1] 
https://cygwin.com/cgit/cygwin-apps/cygport/commit/?id=0b0066f3e778f760ca36a4454fe52eb603f9cf9d

> Downgrading diffutils to 3.10-1 solve the issue.

I though this was a different change where there's a new (benign) 
warning in diff (about diff-ing against an empty or non-existent 
directory?) which leaks out through cygport (that I maybe need to work 
out how to squelch or avoid).

But now you have me thinking that it's more serious than that?