| Developer(s) | Andreas Gruenbacher |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 0.48 / January 28, 2009 |
| Written in | Shell script |
| Operating system | Linux |
| Type | Patch management |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | savannah.nongnu.org/projects/quilt |
Quilt is a software utility for managing a series of changes to the source code of any computer program. Such changes are often referred to as "patches" or "patch sets", and essentially Quilt takes N patches and turns them into a single patch. In doing so, quilt makes it easier for other programmers to test and evaluate the different changes before they are permanently inserted into the source code. This type of tool is very important for distributed software development where many programmers are collaborating to test and build a single large codebase. It's heavily used, for example, by the maintainers of the Linux kernel.
Quilt evolved from a set of patch-management scripts originally written by Linux kernel developer Andrew Morton [1], and was developed by Andreas Grünbacher for maintaining Linux kernel customizations for SuSE Linux.[2] It is now being developed as a community effort, hosted at the GNU Savannah project repository and distributed as free software (the exact license is GNU General Public License v2 or later).
It has been incorporated into dpkg[3], Debian's package manager and will be one of the standard source formats supported from the Debian "squeeze" release onwards. This source format is identified as "3.0 (quilt)" by dpkg.
The name originated from patchwork quilt.