TAoUP: The significance of patch
But something else happened in the year of the AT&T divestiture that would have more long-term importance for Unix. A programmer/linguist named Larry Wall quietly invented the patch(1) utility. The patch program, a simple tool that applies changebars generated by diff(1) to a base file, meant that Unix developers could cooperate by passing around patch sets — incremental changes to code— rather than entire code files. This was important not only because patches are less bulky than full files, but because patches would often apply cleanly even if much of the base file had changed since the patch-sender fetched his copy. With this tool, streams of development on a common source-code base could diverge, run in parallel, and re-converge. The patch program did more than any other single tool to enable collaborative development over the Internet — a method that would revitalize Unix after 1990.
posted Wed 21 Jan 2004 in /books/taoup | link
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