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Kode vicious

Pickled Patches

By George V. Neville-Neil
Communications of the ACM, December 2015, Vol. 58 No. 12, Pages 30-32
10.1145/2835959
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Pickled Patches, illustration — Credit: Andrij Borys Associates / Shutterstock

Dear KV,

I recently came upon a software repository that was not a repo of code, but a repo of patches. The project seemed to build itself out of several other components and then had complicated scripts that applied the patches in a particular order. I had to look at this repo because I wanted to fix a bug in the system, but trying to figure out what the code actually looked like at any particular point in time was baffling. Are there tools that would help in working like this? I have never come across this type of system before, where there were more than 100 patches, some of which contained thousands of lines of code.

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