• Updating Patches
    • Where are the old versions of a specific patch

      They are replaced and erased, no copies of old versions are kept. If you ever need to upgrade a patch you should save a copy of the patch that you applied. You will need it to upgrade your patch. In any case you can always start from clean source applying the new patch.
       

    • How do I update an old patch

      You need the patch that you applied first, all you have to do is to reverse the old patch and apply the new one. This means that you should execute the following commands:

      patch -p 1 -R < old_patch.patch

       
      patch -p 1 < new_patch.patch
      and compile again

      See also:
       What is reversing a patch?

       

    • What is the difference between patches for different versions of Alpine?

      There may be lots of differences. For one thing, a patch for one version may not be suitable for another version of Alpine. This is because some changes in the main source code of Alpine make some hunks fail. However, the most important difference is that some bugs in earlier versions may only be fixed in later versions, so try to use the latest version of the patch if you can. Another difference is that I keep adding features to some of the patches, so eventually a newer version of Alpine will have much more features than old versions of the same patch.
       

    • How do I know if a patch was updated?

      If you see an image or text that says [UPDATED] next to a patch title in the main page, it means that the patch was updated within the last 15 days, otherwise the last line of the page that contains the description of the patch says the last time the patch was updated. The update date indicated there is not the update of the page, but the one of the patch (this is always accurate, since it is generated by a script that saves patches).
       
      As an alternative now I keep a XML/RSS feed, which I update when an update has been made to a patch in this web page. This is a way of announcing updates for patches in addition to the ones indicated above. The feeds can be found at alpine.xml.
       

    • How do I know what update was made to a patch?

      You can not know this for all patches, but I try to keep a log of updates, at least for the most popular patches. If I keep a log of the changes of a patch, you can find it in the updates section. In case I do not keep a log of the change, it may mean that a bug was fixed or a feature was added, but unless you ask, there's no way to know it.