Hari Rajagopal wrote:
Can someone explain how do I install patches.
I can’t believe that a straightforward, reasonable question like this
went unanswered for 2 and a half years. Especially given how little info
there is about applying or installing patches out there.
Anyway, this is how to install/apply patches once you’ve got the .diff
file* downloaded. I don’t know how to do it from repositories, I’m a
newbie too sadly, but hopefully this will be useful to someone.
* note - often patch files are named .dif or .diff, but often they won’t
have any file extension at all. They usually come double-zipped in
.tar.gz despite only being one file.
First, unzip the patch file completely, and put it in the root directory
of your app.
For the next step, you need a bash console – the ones where there is a $
before each input line. This is a unix thing, Linux and Macs come with
them as standard - though I don't know if they have the 'patch' binaries
as standard, sorry.
If you’re using Windows, install CygWin from cygwin.com. Cygwin doesn’t
come with the ‘patch’ binaries package as standard – you need to add it
during the setup process. There’ll be a screen offering you a huge list
of categories of packages. Hit the ‘View’ button to switch to an
alphabetical list of all packages to find 'patch'.
Once you’ve got a bash shell with patch installed, open it, navigate to
your app’s root directory, then do a patch command to apply the patch.
This will usually look like this:-
$ patch -p0 -i name_of_patch_here
I say ‘usually’ because, to be honest, I don’t know what -p0 or -i do,
but it works for me. If that doesn’t work as expected, on one site, I
saw it written this way:-
$ patch -p0 < name_of_patch_here.patch
That should work. I hope this is useful to someone and saves you the
hours it took me to find it all the hard way...
