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If you want to make a patch, you need a starting file and an end point. So you take a pristine tree and call it "foo.orig" or "foo.old" and then run diff -ur f

If you want to make a patch, you need a starting file and an end point. So you take a pristine tree and call it "foo.orig" or "foo.old" and then run diff -ur foo.old foo Maybe younger developers don't know this experience because usually their patches are generated by git diff and the like. But before that stuff was as common as today, you would need to copy the old files off somewhere to generate a patch. At that point you need to name it something.

erichurkman 6y ago
And for some projects, you might not have the disk space for a full 'clean' tree, so you copy just the 2 or 3 files you're editing into `file.old`. And when you're constructing the patch, you hand craft the order in which files are shown to make sure the code lines up to the narrative that accompanies the patch.