installing a patch

[Emma Jane Hogbin <emmajane@xtrinsic.com>]

Preamble:
My system adminstrator for our debian servers says he's installed a patch
I need for a specific piece of software. For some reason it doesn't work.
(I emailed it to him as an attachment from mutt, it's a .gz.0 file.) The
install didn't "fail", but the patch doesn't work. The system
administrator is now refusing to look into the problem.

Question:
I have sudo on the server. I know how to apt-get install; I know how to
install from source. I don't know how to install a patch. I have access to
both the gz and gz.0 versions of the patch.

If a patch has already been applied, can it be applied again, or do you
have to start from scratch?

Can someone give me some very barbie-basic instructions on how to do this?
Assume the patch has been scp-ed to the server, but assume nothing else.

Patches:
http://www.mail-archive.com/htdig-dev@lists.sourceforge.net/msg01338.html
(gz)
http://www.mail-archive.com/htdig-dev@lists.sourceforge.net/msg01356.html
(gz.0)

(I've also emailed my question to the ht://dig mailing list, but most of
them are users, not software folks.)

thanks!

emma

-- 
Emma Jane Hogbin
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