Re: Operation "Careful Emacs"

On Fri, Aug 28, 2026 at 07:29:34AM +0300, Henrik Ahlgren wrote:
> Philip Kaludercic <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > What do you mean by "installing"?
> 
> The GNU project has a tradition of referring to “installing patches”,
> which is roughly equivalent to what is called “merging” today. I've
> always found it charming, but it can be very confusing indeed.

This terminology comes from the binary patch usage, where you used to
directly patch a binrary program. This is still called "install a
patch" [1], although it is disappearing: nowadays with the available
bandwidth, usually you download tha whole program.

The above usage you mention ("merging a patch") comes from a very
specific kind of patch (the output of diff), which you "merge".

The widespread use of VCSes (most of which have adopted diff/patch
as their exchange format) has pushed everything else to history
(personally, I'm not sad about this one :-)

Cheers

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_(computing)#History
-- 
t

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iF0EABECAB0WIQRp53liolZD6iXhAoIFyCz1etHaRgUCapEiKQAKCRAFyCz1etHa
Rlr4AJ4xbcrxN0dR1xoNMO7/l59J7lZOMgCdHygM03UGo0QwD9dFxkchXBF0+gc=
=KKFA
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----