What is a quilt patchset?

Question

There is a git command called git-quiltimport. Its man pages says it "Applies a quilt patchset onto the current git branch, preserving the patch boundaries, patch order, and patch descriptions present in the quilt patchset."

However, it doesn't define what a "quilt patchset" is. What is a "quilt patchset"?

Answer 1

Quilt is a patch managing tool. The idea is that it makes it easier for you to maintain multiple, discrete sets of changes in a single source client, even if they touch the same files.

The official site is sparse on details, but worth if you are thinking of using it.

If you didn't use quilt, you would probably just have to create another client to maintain the separate change sets, but you would have to patch back and forth changes that would benefit both client source trees.

Answer 2

A quilt patchset is a special patch series designed for use with the Quilt toolkit.

Quilt

Quilt is essentially a patch management toolkit. Where it differs from git is that it has no permanent history: The patches themselves can have a de- scription field which usually equates to the commit meta-data in git. Where quilt differs from git is in the anchoring of the patch set (quilt is simply a series of patches above an extracted source base, without any definitive identification of the actual source base being patched).

Git, Quilt and Other Kernel Maintenance Tools (PDF)