Quilt is a software utility for managing a series of changes to the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

of any

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer progra ...

. Such changes are often referred to as " patches" or "patch sets". Quilt can take an arbitrary number of patches as input and condense them into a single patch. In doing so, Quilt makes it easier for many programmers to test and evaluate the different changes amongst patches before they are permanently applied to the source code. Tools of this type are very important for distributed

software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development inv ...

, in which many programmers collaborate to test and build a single large codebase. For example, quilt is heavily used by the maintainers of the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

. Quilt evolved from a set of patch-management scripts originally written by

developer Andrew Morton, and was developed by Andreas Grünbacher for maintaining Linux kernel customizations for SuSE Linux. It is now being developed as a community effort, hosted at the

GNU Savannah GNU Savannah is a project of the Free Software Foundation initiated by Loïc Dachary, which serves as a collaborative software development management system for free Software projects. Savannah currently offers CVS, GNU arch, Subversion, Git, ...

project repository and distributed as

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

(its license is the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

v2, or later). Quilt's name originated from

patchwork quilt A patchwork quilt is a quilt in which the top layer may consist of pieces of fabric sewn together to form a design. Originally, this was to make full use of leftover scraps of fabric, but now fabric is often bought specially for a specific design ...

s. Quilt has been incorporated into

dpkg dpkg is the software at the base of the package management system in the free operating system Debian and its numerous derivatives. dpkg is used to install, remove, and provide information about .deb packages. dpkg (Debian Package) itself is a ...

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of De ...

's package manager, and is one of the standard source formats supported from the Debian "squeeze" release onwards. This source format is identified as "3.0 (quilt)" by dpkg. Quilt is integrated into the

Buildroot Buildroot is a set of Makefiles and patches that simplifies and automates the process of building a complete and bootable Linux environment for an embedded system, while using cross-compilation to allow building for multiple target platforms on ...

, which is notably used by

OpenWrt OpenWrt (from ''open wireless router'') is an open-source project for embedded operating systems based on Linux, primarily used on embedded devices to route network traffic. The main components are Linux, util-linux, musl, and BusyBox. A ...

. Quilt is also integrated into and supported by the similar

Yocto Project The Yocto Project is a Linux Foundation collaborative open source project whose goal is to produce tools and processes that enable the creation of Linux distributions for embedded and IoT software that are independent of the underlying architectu ...

build system supported by the

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Addi ...

. Mercurial queues (mq), an extension of the

Mercurial Mercurial is a distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux. Mercurial's major design goals include high performance and scalabilit ...

revision control system, provides similar functionality; and StGit provides an equivalent functionality on top of

Git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data integ ...

References

External links

* {{Official website, savannah.nongnu.org/projects/quilt
Quilt Tutorial
(PDF) Free computer programming tools

See also

References

External links