This is Debian GNU/Linux's prepackaged version of patch, Larry Wall's program that allows you to apply diffs to a file automagically. The current maintainer for this package is Michael Fedrowitz . Previous maintainers were Bill Mitchell , Darren Stalder and Adrian Bunk . The upstream source is available at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/patch/ This source code is copyright under the GNU General Public License (GPL), a copy of which may be found at /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL