# What is the point of 'pijul patch' without --bin?

**URL:** <https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118>\
**Category:** Question\
**Created:** [December 11, 2017, 2:28pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118 "2017-12-11T14:28:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 13\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![flobec](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/discourse.pijul.org/flobec/32/23_2.png) [@flobec](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/flobec)\
**Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 2:28pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/1 "2017-12-11T14:28:24Z")

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I’m not sure what the point of pijul patch without --bin is. The caveat that it is not fit for applying seems to indicate that --bin should at least be the default, if not the only way to use this command.

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**Author:** ![pmeunier](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/discourse.pijul.org/pmeunier/32/4_2.png) [@pmeunier](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/pmeunier)\
**Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 2:39pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/2 "2017-12-11T14:39:36Z")

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Sure, it’s not great at the moment, but in the future, I’d like this to evolve into a human-readable version of `pijul patch --bin` that can be sent and reviewed over email.

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**Author:** ![flobec](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/discourse.pijul.org/flobec/32/23_2.png) [@flobec](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/flobec)\
**Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 2:41pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/3 "2017-12-11T14:41:29Z")

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I think it’s safer to disable it (say, behind a feature flag) until it’s ready to be consumed by apply. Bad PR await us otherwise.

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**Author:** ![lthms](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/discourse.pijul.org/lthms/32/124_2.png) [@lthms](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/lthms)\
**Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 3:03pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/4 "2017-12-11T15:03:41Z")

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I can only say I use `pijul patch` quite often when I cannot log to the nest (either because I don’t have Internet at the moment or because the nest is slow when I want to use it, for instance) and I still find it convenient, if not perfect. Maybe we could rename it, for instance `pijul show`?

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**Author:** ![flobec](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/discourse.pijul.org/flobec/32/23_2.png) [@flobec](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/flobec)\
**Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 3:05pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/5 "2017-12-11T15:05:44Z")

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What do you use it for? For viewing patches? Maybe it should be named `pijul patch --pretty-print`

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**Author:** ![lthms](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/discourse.pijul.org/lthms/32/124_2.png) [@lthms](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/lthms)\
**Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 3:25pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/6 "2017-12-11T15:25:09Z")

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The more I think about it, the more I believe the most suitable solution is to move the patch pretty printing and all the flags I added to `pijul patch` recently to a new `pijul show` command. It could be a good opportunity to turn `pijul show-dependencies` into `pijul show <hash> --dependencies` or something similar?

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**Author:** ![flobec](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/discourse.pijul.org/flobec/32/23_2.png) [@flobec](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/flobec)\
**Post date:** [December 11, 2017, 3:31pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/7 "2017-12-11T15:31:15Z")

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That’s probably a good idea.

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**Author:** ![yory](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/da6949/32.png) [@yory](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/yory)\
**Post date:** [May 1, 2018, 1:19pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/8 "2018-05-01T13:19:53Z")

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was there any progress on this?

(or is there actually a way to view patches as a human readable diff that I missed, considering that it works on the nest?)

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**Author:** ![pointfree](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/discourse.pijul.org/pointfree/32/13_2.png) [@pointfree](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/pointfree)\
**Post date:** [May 2, 2018, 2:16pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/9 "2018-05-02T14:16:04Z")

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Currently it’s the only way to view what you have recorded after having recorded it without pushing publicly to Nest. I’d like to see its output under the metadata of each patch with a verbose flag `pijul log -v` this is how darcs does it. Nobody is expecting the verbose output of `pijul log` or `darcs changes` to be functional and directly usable by pijul or darcs – it’s just informational. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be cool if the human readable output of pijul log could just be applied from a pastebin or email and pijul would take care of the rest (finding and pulling the patches from remote branch urls and hashes in the metadata etc).

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**Author:** ![yory](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/da6949/32.png) [@yory](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/yory)\
**Post date:** [May 2, 2018, 3:25pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/10 "2018-05-02T15:25:04Z")

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> [@pointfree](#):
>
> Currently it’s the only way to view

You mean `pijul patch --bin`? but is there a way to actually inspect it? if I just print it to the terminal, it looks like garbage 😕

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**Author:** ![pointfree](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/discourse.pijul.org/pointfree/32/13_2.png) [@pointfree](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/pointfree)\
**Post date:** [May 2, 2018, 3:32pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/11 "2018-05-02T15:32:55Z")

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@yory I mean `pijul patch <hash>` without `--bin`. It shows what was recorded in a human readable format. Currently I need to get a patch hash from `pijul log` and paste that in before I run `pijul patch`. That workflow is not very ergonomic.

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**Author:** ![pmeunier](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/discourse.pijul.org/pmeunier/32/4_2.png) [@pmeunier](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/pmeunier)\
**Post date:** [May 2, 2018, 3:37pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/12 "2018-05-02T15:37:37Z")

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`pijul patch --bin` is supposed to be a faster way for the protocol to fetch a patch through SSH. This might perhaps be replaced by a simple `cat` (is it safe to assume that `cat` always exists on a remote SSH server? what if that server runs Windows?)

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**Author:** ![yory](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/da6949/32.png) [@yory](https://discourse.pijul.org/u/yory)\
**Post date:** [May 2, 2018, 5:14pm UTC](https://discourse.pijul.org/t/what-is-the-point-of-pijul-patch-without-bin/118/13 "2018-05-02T17:14:14Z")

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If I don’t use --bin I can’t see any output. I think it was disabled, according to previous posts in this thread?