Re: .diff files

[Corrin Lakeland <lakeland@cs.otago.ac.nz>]

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> Now I'm faced with my utter ignorance.  I have a couple linux boxes, but
> this is my first crack at debian.  There are some patches that let my use
> various hardware features (eg touch screen), but they come in the form of
> .diff files.  I haven't dealt with this file type before.  How do I use
> these files?

A diff file is created by (surprise) the program 'diff'.  There is a program 
called patch for automatically applying diff files to an original file (often 
referred to as .orig).  you may find the following works:
	patch -p0 filename.diff

For <lots of years> people have distributed diffs designed for patch as 
.patch files rather than .diff files, so it is possible your .diff file 
specifically does not work with patch, or is very old.

Anyway, you should be able to get there eventually, just fiddle the arguments 
a little.

Oh, you have to have the original (unmodified) file that you apply the patch 
to, the .diff only contains the differences to the original.

Corrin Lakeland
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