Makepatch

makepatch is a nifty tool that allows you to create a single patch file (input for Larry Wall's patch program) from two directory hierarchies. A mandatory tool if you have to maintain software packages. It is written in Perl, of course.

Features of this utility include:

• Recursive descend through sub-directories.
• Generation of commands to remove obsolete files.
• Automatic handling of the patchlevel.h file first.
• Automatic inclusion of Index: and Prereq: lines.
• Ability to utilize specified manifest files.
• Dedicated applypatch program can be used to do the patching, for improved verification and robustness.
• Patch data is more reliable by relocating to the current directory.
• Sources trees can come from archives, e.g. .tar.gz files.

Here's an article I wrote for The Perl Journal about makepatch.

Current version

2.02

Archived

CPAN sites. The CPAN search engine will find it for you.
Alternatively, you can look in directory authors/Johan_Vromans for file makepatch-x.y.tar.gz, where x.y indicates the version number.