I don’t really do much Unix development, but I’ve recently been learning more due to the care and feeding of my blog. Lately I’ve been figuring out some things about the patch utility, especially creating and applying patches. I found a decent tutorial on patch and diff which are the two tools needed to apply and create (respectively) patch files. The tutorial goes into much more depth than I would ever attempt. It’s also well written, so I’ll just point people there instead of re-inventing the wheel. But I think a “diff & patch” nutshell usage would be appropriate, so here it is.
Creating a patch (individual files)
diff -u old-file new-file >patch-file
Creating a patch (whole directory/tree)
diff -urN old-directory new-directory >patch-file
Applying a patch (individual file or whole directory/tree)
patch <patch-file
While reading the article, I discovered that I had made some mistakes when I created at least one of my patchfiles, so I went through all my patch-related posts and re-created everything. I’m very glad I did! I found a whole bunch of small corrections I had made to BorderlineChaos which I’d forgotten to document and/or release in my post on Borderline Chaos’s date format. Likewise, I made many minor changes which I didn’t document in my journalized-blue post. Finally, the patch for Felix Wong’s tags plugin was definitely broken. I’ve corrected it and updated the original article.
I finally got around to upgrading my WordPress blog software to version 1.5.2 today. I also took this opportunity to apply Kimmo’s entity patch, which takes care of HTML entities ½ and ¾, and probably some others as well. At least I remembered to reapply the tags patch this time!
Applying these patches got me thinking about folks that aren’t “patch-aware”, i.e. don’t know how to apply patches. It’s almost trivially simple. On a Unix (or Unix-like) system, the command is:
patch original-file patch-file
where patch-file is the name of the file containing the patch(es), while original-file is the file that you are going to fix. This works fine as long as only one file is affected, as is the case with Kimmo’s patch. You can tell this by reading the patch file and looking for long lines of punctuation such as
***************
or
===================================================================
If you see more than one of these lines, there are multiple files affected. Such is the case with Felix Wong’s tags patch. For this one, the command is:
patch -p1 <patch-file
which should be executed from your wordpress directory. Explaining this command requires knowledge of directories/file structures, which I don’t want to cover right now.
A bit of hacking on Felix’s tags plugin (version 0.3.0) has cleaned up the Sharepoint theme. I added a new parameter, “countposts” (default true), to the listtags() function. This controls the display of number of posts. The patch is here, just right-click and save locally or use your browser’s “view source” command.
This code could probably be much cleaner, but it gets the job done for me right now. Enjoy!
Update: 2005-09-03 05:36 UTC–the patchfile has been fixed. See this article for more info.
I finished hacking up Journalized-Blue to support the tags plugin. Since this is the only theme I have finished (wrt tags), I have made this the default theme for my blog.
Replacing categories with tags for this theme turned out to involve only two files, index.php and leftcolumn.php. Patches for both files are below. I made the theme “tags aware”, so if you have the tags plugin, the theme will show tags wherever it now shows categories. If you want both tags and categories, it’d be very simple to hack the patched files so that categories were always displayed.
The patches are .txt files. I can’t recall how to force these to display “as is” (my http-fu is weak, I’ll admit), but you can either right-click on these links and save the files locally or simply click on the links and then use your browser’s “view source” command to see the straight .txt files.
Update: 2005-09-03 05:32 UTC
I’ve created a single patchfile of all the changes I’ve made to Journalized-blue. More information is available in this article.
A fix to the awesome Borderline Chaos theme. I started noticing that my blog’s date format wasn’t being used, so I started poking around some more in the theme files. I found a couple of places where hard-coded date formats had been used. The following patches take care of these issues. Careful! I have been fiddling with the theme files already, so my line numbers may not match the master files’. A little human intervention may be needed, and the patches only involve three or four lines of code changes so it’s no biggee to take care of this manually.
index.php patch
single.php patch
I tried using the function “the_date()” out of template-functions-general, but it’s a little too smart for its own good–this function automagically hides the date if it’s the same as the “previousday”, i.e. if the first two posts are dated the same, the date will show up on the first one but it will be suppressed on the second one.
Update: 2005-09-03T05:26 UTC
As mentioned in this article, I created a single patchfile containing all the changes I made to Borderline Chaos. I’ll document these later.
