Quilt

Quilt is this awesome open-source software that’s small, fast, and super easy to use. You can grab it for free! Basically, it’s a command-line tool that helps you manage patches by keeping track of all the changes each patch makes. How cool is that?

What Can You Do with Quilt?

With Quilt, you can apply patches to programs and also remove them whenever you want. Plus, if you need to refresh a patch, no problem! The main focus here is on patches since they’re the primary output—it's all about making those work smoothly instead of just worrying about .h or .c files.

A Bit of History

This whole Quilt project got its inspiration from Andrew Morton’s patch scripts from the Linux kernel mailing list. It’s been tweaked and improved quite a bit since then. If you're curious about the original stuff, check out this link.

Getting Started with Quilt

If you want to see what command-line options are available in Quilt, just type ‘quilt --help’ in your terminal emulator app. This will show you all the options at a glance along with some helpful usage messages.

Key Commands to Know

The most important commands include --trace, which runs commands in bash trace mode for debugging, and --quiltrc, allowing you to use a custom configuration file instead of the default one that lives in your Home directory.

Installing Quilt on GNU/Linux

You can easily install Quilt on any GNU/Linux system! Just download the latest version from Softpedia using their dedicated download section above. Save it in your Home directory and extract it with an archive manager tool.

The Installation Steps

Open up your Terminal app, navigate to where those extracted files are using the ‘cd’ command (like cd /home/softpedia/quilt-0.63). Then run ./configure && make. This will configure and compile Quilt for you. Finally, run sudo make install so it installs system-wide—making it available for everyone on your machine!

If you’re ready to get started with Quilt right away, don’t forget to check out this great link for more info: Download Quilt Software!