This might sound strange, but sometimes I prefer patches to pull requests. The main scenario is when I’m reviewing someone else’s code and I want to propose an alternative implementation.

I could just create a new branch and pull request with my change, but then the conversation is split between two PRs, and there’s a new branch that you have to clean up.

When the change is small enough, or I’m not sure if it will be accepted, I’d rather send a patch. So far I’ve been doing git diff, uploading the result to gist, and posting the link as a comment in the PR. This has a few shortcomings:

• No binary support.
• If the original author wants to use it, authorship is usually lost, unless they use the --author option for git commit, and even then there’s room for typos.

I know there’s a better way, as Git was originally designed to share patches, not pull requests. I think I’ve been avoiding it because it’s not as common and the original author might not know what to do with the patch. So I’m writing this as a quick tutorial.

Creating a patch

Before creating a patch, you have to commit your changes. git format-patch will create a patch file for each commit, so your history can be preserved. Once you have a commit, your branch is ahead of origin, so we can use that to tell format-patch which commits to pick

branch=git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD
origin="origin/$branch"
git format-patch $origin

This will leave one or more .patch files in your project directory:

$ ls *.patch
0001-Store-relative-paths-for-reader-topics.patch

Upload those to Gist and leave a comment with the link on the PR:

$ gist -co *.patch

Applying a patch

For a single patch, you can copy the Raw link in the Gist and download it

$ curl -sLO https://gist.github.com/koke/1b30d861e6bb9d366f69bc186d0e9525/raw/8cc27f3e589a7823b2e9f1746aa921b92da14187/0001-Store-relative-paths-for-reader-topics.patch

If there are multiple files, make sure you use the Download Zip link (or download all the files one by one):

$ curl -sLo patches.zip https://gist.github.com/koke/ab100907c17c4ef6a977350494679091/archive/3fb0136a21a6bc499bff2511750c62ae6dc41630.zip
$ unzip -j patches.zip 
Archive:  patches.zip
3fb0136a21a6bc499bff2511750c62ae6dc41630
  inflating: 0001-Store-relative-paths-for-reader-topics.patch  
  inflating: 0002-Whitespace-changes.patch  

Once you have the patch file(s) in your project directory, just run git am -s *.patch:

$ git am -s *.patch
Applying: Store relative paths for reader topics
Applying: Whitespace changes

Review the changes, and if you’re happy with them, git push them. Otherwise, you can reset your branch to point at the pushed changes:

branch=git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD
origin="origin/$branch"
git reset --hard $origin

Finally, run git clean -df, or manually remove the downloaded files.