What's a patch?

Patches contain code changes in such a way that these changes can be automatically applied to a source tree. Thus, if you want to add some fix available as a patch you just apply this patch to your sources. You don't have to edit every file on your own and copy-and-paste from some website.

In order to apply a patch you need a source tree similar to that one of the patch's author. This usually means you should have the same release, but in some cases it might be the case that patches depend on others. The patches on this page are created against Irrlicht version 0.14.
To apply a patch follow these steps.

1. Download the patch
2. Change into the Irrlicht source tree, i.e. the directory called Irrlicht where lots of *.cpp files are located.
3. Execute the following command patch -p1 < patchfile

If some errors are encountered during patching a backup file with extension .orig is created. This is also the case if only some warning has been issued due to a different location of the changes. In cases where the patch programme could not determine the correct location to apply the changes an error is issued and another file with extension .rej is created. This file contains all changes which could not be applied to the file.

To create a new patch based on your own modification you should do the following. Please note that you have to keep another source tree containing the original sources.

• Edit the code and check that it is compilable
• Change to the parent directory
• Execute diff -Naur originalSourceDir changedSourceDir > newPatchFile
  Since the patch would contain all changes from all files already contained in previous patches you have to keep your original sources on the same patch level like your working directory. If you want to remove some parts of the patch you should only remove complete blocks which begin with @@ otherwise your patch might be broken.

  The patch tool is also available for Windows command line. Check out The Gnuwin32 project. Please note the warning on that page that patches need the additonal command line parameter --binary. This is due to the different line end marker used on the different platforms. You may as well use Cygwin which will bring a lot of other useful tools, too ;-) Though, you also have to use --binary there.

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  Christian Stehno (hybrid) E-Mail
  (last updated: April, 13th, 2006)