There are a lot of old systems that not use Control Version System even in 2015. Or you have no access to repository where you need to edit something. And here is time for patches.

Even if you are using Git and SVN you need to prepare patch to send it repository owner.

Situation 1

You have your Git repository and you need to prepare patch for antoher Git repository. And Git here is really awesome. git-format-patch is what you need.

git format-patch HEAD~5..HEAD

It will generate patch file for each commit (5 in this case). If you have separate branch for your commits you can use

git format-patch master --stdout > patch-name.patch

In this variant you will have only one file. In both cases then you need just to apply each patch with git-am

git am /path/to/patch/file.patch

but if you have a problems with this or (as in my case) your repositories not sync git-apply with right arguments can help you

git apply --reject --ignore-space-change --ignore-whitespace /path/to/patch/file.patch

It will apply patch and generate *.rej files in case of something can’t be merged automaticly.

Situation 2

You have SVN. Mm, not so good. But let’s try. To prepare patch you need to use svn-diff

svn diff --revision REVISION_NUMBER > /path/to/patch/file.patch

and apply patch

patch -p0 -i /path/to/patch/file.patch

But be careful, please, it’s SVN and it not forgive mistakes.

Situation 3

You have Git repository and you need to prepare patch for SVN. Welcome to the hell! You can use git-svn. It seems like perfect variant. You can work with your SVN repository as with Git repository. So, prepare patch in Git repository, apply it with git-apply or git-am and commit with git svn dcommit. There is no any universal variants.