An Application to describe .patch files

Question

Do you know any application that be able to describe .patch files?
I mean an application that be able to get .patch file & give me a human readable of the changes it make on files so I'll be able to make that changes manually on another verson of target file.

Thanks

Answer 1

Patch files are human readable and can be opened and viewed on most text editors(Notepad++ being my preferred)

Answer 2

If you mean .patch files as produced by standard Unix/Linux diff(1) tool and applied by patch(1) tool, then there's a convention on having description for them right inside the patch file, at the beginning of it (that's because patch(1) tool will ignore anything before the actual patch header in the file).

Here's typical example from a Linux kernel patches.

There're number of tools which can be used to manage set of (related) patches: list, show description, apply/unapply, etc. The simplest one is probably quilt. Then there's also StGit. These two system are centered around the concept of patches (and so allow additional flexibility dealing with them, for example, to change the order in which they're applied). But what's important is that whenever you use any version control system, you essentially deal with the system to store and describe patches.

For example, "git log" will show you descriptions of patches applied, in order. And "git log -p" will show both descriptions and patches themselves.