Creating and applying patches

Overview

Often, when work on a project is shared between many developers, you need to work with, review and mabye transfer changes that haven't been committed yet. To help with with process, SVN provides the functionality to create a patch, which works with Eclipse's built-in ability to apply a patch.

Patches are representations of changes to a given version of the repository state, and can easily be transferred to other developers; for example, when one developer (who doesn't have commit access) needs to submit a change to someone who can then review and commit it.

Creating a patch

Select your project or a folder/file and take the Team > Create patch... option. Save the patch to a file and distribute the file via email or whatever mechanism is appropriate.

To have new files included in your patch you must use the Team > Add to Version Control option prior to creating the patch. This will tell SVN to include it in the patch.

Applying a patch

Select the project or a folder/file and take the Team > Apply patch... option. This will walk you through a wizard that lets you specify the patch location and then apply it to your working copy.