Patch Systems
Sometimes, a maintainer needs to modify the original source. While, in the past, this was often done simply by editing the files in place and including the changes in the diff.gz, this could make maintenance difficult when new upstream versions were released, because all the changes had to be examined and merged when necessary.
The newer source format, 3.0 (quilt), uses the quilt patch system, to allow the modifications to be broken into groups of logically separated patches, each of which deals with one change and can be sent upstream as is. These patches live in debian/patches.
There are also packages using other patch systems, such as dpatch. It generates and executes shell scripts that are non-standard unified diff files with a header, which nevertheless are compatible with the standard diff utility. The debian/rules file is modified to call dpatch apply-all before building the binary package and dpatch deapply-all before building the source package (and cleaning up any build byproducts). quilt and certain other patch systems eliminate the need for special headers and use standard diff files.
Read more about this topic: Debian Build Toolchain
Famous quotes containing the words patch and/or systems:
“Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t’expel the winter’s flaw!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The only people who treasure systems are those whom the whole truth evades, who want to catch it by the tail. A system is just like truth’s tail, but the truth is like a lizard. It will leave the tail in your hand and escape; it knows that it will soon grow another tail.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)