Question

Personally, I use the word "patch" as the software equivalent of a symptomatic treatment, which makes a patch a quick-and-dirty bugfix. However, I m not sure this is correct, because I often see it is used in other meanings, for example as a synonym of a program update.

What does the word "patch" mean exactly?

Update: I think terminology does matter a lot, because it is a fundamental aspect of documentation and communication, and therefore of software development in general. The problem is that computer lingo is defined rather loosely, and I don t know which dictionary provides the definite reference. Therefore I thought it was a good idea to ask this here on StackOverflow.

Answer 1

From Wikipedia:

A patch is a piece of software designed to fix problems with, or update a computer program or its supporting data. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, and improving the usability or performance. Though meant to fix problems, poorly designed patches can sometimes introduce new problems (see software regressions).

Answer 2

You can find the definitions in the Jargon File: patch. Your personal usage of the term seems to fall under 1, while generally the word "patch" has become a strong synonym for "diff" in recent years.

Apart from that, I m with S.Lott on this one: what does it matter?

Answer 3

In the open source area, a patch is a means of communicating amongst developers. The patch itself is a machine and human readable piece of text describing changes to source code.

The word patch itself has no connotation of "quick and dirty", or a "fix" in this context. It just is a change to source code.

Search terms for further research: diff, patch

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