patch: Piecing together what I should say

I’m a little timid about mentioning patch, mostly because I have a feeling that there are literally thousands of people who know patch a lot better than me.

I’ll spare you the action-packed screenshot this time, since I can’t really patch anything without both target code and a viable patch to use.

My earliest run-ins with patch, aside from blind and wild swings while using Ubuntu, were while tinkering with Crux ports, years ago.

These days I occasionally have to fine-tune an errant PKGBUILD with patch, but that’s the exception and not the rule.

So my experience with patch is very superficial and I won’t embarrass myself by throwing out random suggestions. Especially when I am sure there are many verified experts hovering on the fringe, ready to answer questions.

patch is obliquely related to diff, which we looked over a long time ago. In Arch though, patch lives in its own package (named patch, as you might expect 🙄 ). In Debian? Wouldn’t you know it, patch is in patch.

Which I suppose means you could have one installed on your system, but not the other. Why you would want that is beyond me. 😐

So now that I’ve told you basically nothing about a tool that’s just about everywhere at once, I’ll shut up. If you can’t say something nice — or in this case, smart — don’t say anything at all. 😳