Quilt (software)

Quilt (software)

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 is heavily used, for example, by the maintainers of the Linux kernel.