ubuntu-x-swat team mailing list archive

[Martin Olsson <mnemo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

@Arjen, patches are "descriptions of changes to source code" and they
are not meant to be installed by end users. Normally, users do not have
any source code installed and even if you change the source code itself
nothing happens because it the binary version of the driver that is
being used (this is because the driver is written in C and not in for
example Python where the code is executed directly sort of). The idea is
that developers patch the driver and then an proper binary update is
issued (usually you get the new version in the next version of Ubuntu
except for really nasty bugs).

Anyway, you can install the source code yourself and then apply the
patch to the make the required changes and then compile the driver to
create an installable DEB. For example if you want to install the source
code for a package called PACKAGE_NAME, you'd need to:

mkdir my_dir
cd my_dir
apt-get source PACKAGE_NAME
cd some_dir_which_was_created
patch -p0 < ~/path/to/changes.patch
debuild -us -uc -b
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i some_binary_installable.deb

It's the patch command that modifies the code and it's the debuild
command that converts the code into an installable DEB update. However,
you can't run these commands blindly you need to change them a little
bit to suite whatever patch you want to try (some patches requires
"patch -p1" instead of "patch -p0" for example). Also, once you do this
you will be running an unsupported version of Ubuntu and you might
experience new bugs etc.

The Ubuntu wiki has lots of good links of how to compile code, build DEB
packages, work with patches etc but it's a lot to learn. This stuff is
meant for developers who want to contribute to Ubuntu.

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