Daily Archives: 21 November 2016

Recently we had to download GNU patch from version 2.7.1 to any version less than version 2.7 series.
We used patch version 2.6.1 which is the latest in the version 2.6 series.

We were trying to compile Linux Kernel 3.0.35 source code with some custom patches.
While applying the patches we got the following errors:

File firmware/imx/sdma/sdma-imx25-to1.bin: git binary diffs are not supported.
File firmware/imx/sdma/sdma-imx31-to1.bin: git binary diffs are not supported.
File firmware/imx/sdma/sdma-imx31-to2.bin: git binary diffs are not supported.
File firmware/imx/sdma/sdma-imx35-to1.bin: git binary diffs are not supported.
File firmware/imx/sdma/sdma-imx35-to2.bin: git binary diffs are not supported.
File firmware/imx/sdma/sdma-imx50-to1.bin: git binary diffs are not supported.
File firmware/imx/sdma/sdma-imx51-to3.bin: git binary diffs are not supported.
File firmware/imx/sdma/sdma-imx53-to1.bin: git binary diffs are not supported.

Apparently, version 2.7 does not support binary diffs.
We can verify this claim from the release announcement.

Support for most features of the “diff –git” format, including renames and copies, permission changes, and symlink diffs. Binary diffs are not supported yet; patch will complain and skip them.

Methodology

#Making sure we are not missing any 32bit libraries since we are on a 64bit machine
yum install glibc.i686 ncurses-libs.i686;
#Download the source code
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/patch/patch-2.6.1.tar.gz;
#Extract the files
tar -zxf patch-2.6.1.tar.gz;
#Navigate to the folder
cd patch-2.6.1;
#Configure the installation and make all necessary checks
./configure;
#Build
make;
#Remove existing version
sudo yum remove patch -y;
#Install
sudo make install;