[Mailman-Users] Building a patch file

[Todd]

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Paul Kleeberg wrote:
> Could anyone direct me to instructions on how to build a patch file 
> for the totally clueless?

I don't have any handy URLs, but I can try and give you a brief example of
how to do this.

> I want to be able to modify the way all the english html pages appear 
> (which I did successfully once) but I would like to do it as a patch 
> so it is easy to redo as necessary.

As with all things *nix, there are several ways to do it.  If you are going
to be modifying many files, I prefer to create two copies of the directory
containing the modified files.  In the case of mailman, I would have
mailman-orig and mailman.  Make the changes you want to make in the mailman
directory and then use diff:

[user at host tmp]# diff -uNr mailman-orig mailman > /path/to/mailman.patch

The diff options are:

    -u  unified output format
    -N  In directory comparison, if a file is found in only one directory,
        treat it as present but empty in the other directory.
    -r  recursively compare any subdirectories

To apply this patch to another mailman install, you would cd into the
mailman directory use patch:

[user at host mailman]# patch -p1 < /path/to/mailman.patch

The -p1 tells patch to strip off the first part of the directory info stored
in the patch file, which is what you want if you've created a recursive diff
as I did above.

Check the diff and patch manpages for more details.

- -- 
Todd              OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xD654075A | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
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