Patches

This page does not describe how to produce a patch to be submitted upstream, please read Sending Patches for that.

.diff files

Frequently patches to source code are presented or discussed in forums or in mailing lists in so called .diff format (these are "differences" to the source code).

You can apply those patches yourself to the source code or create .diff files. This requires the patchutils package in Cygwin.

Patching source code

Download a so called .diff file:

sse2-pixel-routines-v3.diff (example)

NOTE: make sure the file doesn't get a .txt extension, so Save as type "All Files" instead of "Text Document" (IE has a habit of renaming to .txt. If that happens just simply rename to .diff)

Copy the .diff file into the appropriate source folder

x264-trunk (example)

Apply the patch as follows

patch -p0 < sse2-pixel-routines-v3.diff (example)

NOTE: replace sse2-pixel-routines-v3.diff with your "patch"

This will output something like:

patching file common/i386/pixel.h
patching file common/i386/pixel-a.asm
patching file common/pixel.c

Your source code is now patched!

NOTE: If you want to revert to the original version you can use the -R option with the patch command or alternatively you can just delete the changed files and just do an SVN update to get the original/latest SVN version back.

Creating .diff files

When changing the source code it's possible to create a "difference" file against the latest source.

In this example the file /modules/codec/x264.c was changed (the part "in kbit/s" was added to a description).

Start your Cygwin shell.

Change to the appropriate folder where a changed file is.

cd vlc-trunk/modules/codec (example)

Output the svn diff command to a file:

svn diff -u > x264-patch.diff

The current folder now holds a x264-patch.diff file containing the following:

Index: x264.c
===================================================================
--- x264.c      (revision 15921)
+++ x264.c      (working copy)
@@ -131,7 +131,7 @@
 #define RATETOL_LONGTEXT N_( "Allowed variance in average. " \
     "bitrate (in kbits/s).")

-#define VBV_MAXRATE_TEXT N_("Max local bitrate")
+#define VBV_MAXRATE_TEXT N_("Max local bitrate in kbit/s")
 #define VBV_MAXRATE_LONGTEXT N_( "Sets a maximum local bitrate in kbits/s.")

 #define VBV_BUFSIZE_TEXT N_("VBV buffer")

NOTE: In Windows you should open this file with something else than notepad (so wordpad or some more advanced editor). This has to do with the end of line markers that are present in the file since it was made in a Linux environment.