From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
Date: 2003-07-26T00:00:26+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby 1.8.0 preview4 (Bug in ext/openssl/extconf.rb)

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 02:45:29PM +0000, Mike wrote:
> Depends; "<" is new, ">" is old.   Yes, I added a call to FOO.
> I knew I should have used a context diff!  :-)

Context is always a good idea, but wouldn't make a difference
in this case.  The patch(1) command expects files
to be diff(1)ed in the order "old new", and the left file
gets the < and the right file gets the >.

Now, patch(1) is smart enough to detect a backwards patch and
try it the other way around, but it issues a warning 
and this may distress those trying to apply your
patch.  So it's best to stick to the conventional order. :)

-Mark