This version of patch contains modifications made by the Free Software
Foundation, summarized in the file ChangeLog.  Primarily they are to
support the unified context diff format that GNU diff can produce, to
support making GNU Emacs-style backup files, and to support the GNU
conventions for option parsing and configuring and compilation.  They
also include fixes for some bugs.

The FSF is distributing this version of patch independently because as
of this writing, Larry Wall has not released a new version of patch
since mid-1988.  I have heard that he has been too busy working on
other things, like Perl.

Here is a wish list of some projects to improve patch:

1.  Correctly handle files and patchfiles that contain NUL characters.
This is hard to do straightforwardly; it would be less work to
adopt a kind of escape encoding internally.
Let ESC be a "control prefix".  ESC @ stands for NUL.  ESC [ stands for ESC.
You need to crunch this when reading input (replace fgets),
and when writing the output file (replace fputs),
but otherwise everything can go along as it does now.
Be careful to handle reject files correctly;
I think they are currently created using `write', not `fputs'.

2.  Correctly handle patches produced by GNU diff for files that do
not end with a newline.

Please send bug reports for this version of patch to
bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu as well as to Larry Wall (lwall@netlabs.com).
 --djm@gnu.ai.mit.edu (David MacKenzie)

			Patch Kit, Version 2.0

		    Copyright (c) 1988, Larry Wall

You may copy the patch kit in whole or in part as long as you don't try to
make money off it, or pretend that you wrote it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

See the file INSTALL for compilation and installation instructions for Unix.

For non-Unix systems, copy config.h.in to config.h and change
#undef statements in it to #define as appropriate for your system,
and copy Makefile.in to Makefile and set the variables that are
enclosed in @ signs appropriate for your system.
