Re: Patches

[Dennis Payne <payned@rpi.edu>]

At present, I suggest mailing patches directly to the mailing list.
If this generates too much mail or too many complaint, I may change
it to placing them on my ftp site.  (If the patch file is very large,
it might be best to send it to me instead anyway.)

(Anybody know of a site with a good explaination of patch and diff?)

Applying Patches
     To apply a patch, you generally just run 'patch <patchfile' in the
directory of the program.

Creating Patches
     To create a patch, run diff versus the changed files.  Now this
can be done in many ways.  If it is just one file it is easy enough to
run 'diff --unified file.c.orig file.c'.  However most of the time
changes involve several files so it is easier to compare directories,
something like 'diff --unified --recursive ../xwpe-orig .'.  The output
of diff is sent to standard out so you will want to redirect ouput to a
file, 'diff --unified --recursive ../xwpe-orig . >xwpe.patch'.

(For more information you might try the man pages and/or the info pages.)

Dennis Payne
payned@rpi.edu