Getting and applying patches

In the top level directory, issuing the command

./getpatch -all

causes all registered patches that are not yet installed to be downloaded from the MOLPRO web site. This script requires the freely available gzip(http://www.fsf.org/software/gzip) and wget(http://www.fsf.org/software/wget) utilities to be installed. As an alternative, the complete set of patches can be obtained as a tar archive from the web pages. Patches can then be applied, either individually or in totality, by saying

./applypatch patch1.sh.gz patch2.sh.gz ...

Some patches depend on others, and in such circumstances the order of patch application matters. The individual patch files will refuse to install themselves if there is an unresolvable conflict. applypatch, however, sorts all the patches it is given into a feasible order before applying them one by one. Thus, it is always best to use applypatch once with all the patches you need together, and it is normally best to apply all available patches in this way. It is in fact safest to say simply

./applypatch

which will install all patch files in the current directory, or, even better,

./applypatch -all

which first does getpatch -all. It is seldom a good idea to apply patches selectively, since then one may have the problem later that another patch cannot be applied because of conflicts.

Patch files automatically outdate any targets that need rebuilding as a result of the patch; for example, relevant object files are removed from the object library. Thus, after all patches have been applied, it is usually necessary to rebuild the program using make.