The set-up

Through this training mission, imagine you are a big fan of pancakes. Recently, you published a book with all your best recipes.

The book has taken the global pancake community by storm, and many of your adoring fans are creating and sharing modifications to your recipes through "patch" files.

In this training mission, by playing different roles, you will learn how to create and apply patches via the diff and patch command-line tools.

Context in open source

For many open source development communities, patches are the basis of how contributors describe and share changes. Projects small and large often ask users to "submit a patch" with new features or bugfixes. For example, for decades, the Linux kernel project has asked contributors to send patch files to the main project mailing list for discussion and integration into the main project.

This mission consists of four parts: diffing individual files, patching individual files, diffing entire directory hierarchies, and patching entire directory hierarchies.

Get started with patching »