Subject: bug#32347: gzip cannot be patched

From: Marius Bakke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2018 13:32:02 +0200

Hello!

I'm trying to add a patch to 'gzip', but it causes an infinite loop and
eventually the system runs out of memory.

It can be reproduced by adding this hunk:

modified   gnu/packages/compression.scm
@@ -215,6 +215,7 @@ adding and extracting files to/from a tar archive.")
             (method url-fetch)
             (uri (string-append "mirror://gnu/gzip/gzip-"
                                 version ".tar.xz"))
+            (snippet '(#t))
             (sha256
              (base32
               "16h8g4acy7fgfxcjacr3wijjsnixwsfd2jhz3zwdi2qrzi262l5f"))))

[back]

I guess this is because gzip itself is a patch input.  Is this something
that can be fixed, or do we have to use "patching phases" in these cases?