Patchouli — patch creator

Patchouli is a simple tool for extracting a set of patches from annotated source code.

The user edits and compiles the source code normally, but annotates (using C-preprocessor directives) newly added lines and other modifications as belonging to a certain patch. At any point the entire patch set can be created automatically.

Patchouli is especially useful in projects where maintainers expect big changes to be broken down to many small "stages", each easier to understand. The programmer would still like to work on the source code as a whole.

Patchouli was written by Nadav Har'El based on an original idea proposed by Abel Gordon.

Patchouli features:

• Work with the whole source code, not on individual patches.
• Source code is always ready to compile and includes all patches.
• Splitting a patch, moving changes from one patch to another, and so on, is very easy.
• Continue to use revision control on the source code normally, to track modifications and allow multiple programmers to cooperate. Compare this to patch generation tools which keep each patch as a revision, preventing you from using revisions normally.
• Make it easy to generate well-formed and well-documented patches intended for code review.
• Make it easy to send these patches to a mailing list.
• Option to verify that all patch levels of the source code compile.

Documentation:

• po(1) manual page

Download:

Patchouli is based on original source code written by Nadav Har'El while an IBM employee. This code is copyright © 2010-2013 IBM Corp., and used in Patchouli with permission. However, IBM is not the owner or maintainer of Patchouli, does not endorse it, is not directly receiving any code contributed to this project, or has any other connection with this project. All comments, suggestions, contributions, questions or claims regarding Patchouli should be referred to Nadav Har'El directly.

Patchouli released as free software under the Apache License v2.

• Github repository holding the Patchouli source code and this site.
• po, the Patchouli script for generating and verifying patches.
• po.1, the manual page (see HTML version above).
• sendpatches, a separate script for sending patches to a mailing list.