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I have prepared a "patch" to my customer who will need to manually apply it to their code. If patch is applied partially due to conflicts then the whole procedure needs to be immediately reversed.

I wonder if there is a argument or a small script I can send them which performs atomic patch application.

Thanks.

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3 Answers

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git apply can be used for this. It does not require a Git repository.

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my client has some ridiculous security regulation and extra software may not be installed without authorization, and git is extra. I tried to talk some sense, but it's not up to me. – romaninsh Jan 17 at 15:37
@romaninsh Oh well. But "It's good enough for the kernel developers" might be a convincing argument. (It was made by kernel developers.) – grawity Jan 17 at 15:38
Im quite sure if it would go through security review they would consider it as safe as curl, but they does not want to go through the procedure just because of me. And I deal with people who can't do much about it. – romaninsh Jan 17 at 15:46
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I don't know what and how many files need to be patched. My favorite doing would be:

  • make a copy of the working project and apply the patch to the copy

  • was the patch successful? does the copy work? then move the working project to project.old and the copy to project

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Instead of "project.old", better use programs designed specifically for that; namely a version control system such as git, hg, svn. – grawity Jan 17 at 14:29
I think that's what is happening right now. I'm supplying list of files and they copy them one by one over the top of old ones. – romaninsh Jan 17 at 15:38
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I resolved this with the following:

patch -f --dry-run < p  && patch -f < p >/dev/null || echo "Failed to patch"

If patch application is unsuccessful during the dry-run, it does not apply anything and provides user with the output he can send back to me.

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