What Is a Patch

Let's suppose you are working to a set of XML files, that you distribute to other people. From time to time you are tagging the project and distribute the releases. If you continue working for a period correcting problems, you may find yourself in the situations to notify your users that you have corrected a problem. In this case you may prefer to distribute them a patch, a collection of differences that applied over the last distribution would correct the problem. The SVN client creates the patch in the Unified Diff format.

Creating a patch in Apache SubversionTM implies the access to two states (revisions) of a project: