wiggle mit Homebrew, apk, apt, MacPorts, Nix, zypper installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Upstream-Dokumentation
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• wiggle

Projektgeschichte

Neil Brown announced the first public release of wiggle on the Linux kernel mailing list on May 19, 2003. The announcement described the core use case as applying patches that `patch` cannot apply because the original file has conflicting changes, especially when back-porting patches from development kernels onto stable kernels.

The name came from Andrew Morton's phrasing about wanting a tool to 'wiggle' a patch into a file. The first public announcement already included a tests directory, a patch-management helper script named `p`, and a note that a future visualization UI would be useful.

The manual page preserves the tool's long maintenance arc, with copyright lines spanning 2003, 2010-2013, and 2018-2020. GitHub releases list v1.0 through v1.3, with v1.3 published in October 2020.

Adoptionsgeschichte

wiggle's adoption has been specialized rather than mass-market. It is useful to kernel and distribution developers, downstream maintainers, and anyone carrying patch queues across drifting source trees. The GitHub repository showed about 108 stars and 9 forks in July 2026, but its more important adoption signal is its presence in Unix packaging ecosystems and its long-lived man page as a developer tool.

Wie es verwendet wird

A common workflow is to run `patch`, collect `.rej` files, then run `wiggle --replace originalfile originalfile.rej` for each rejected hunk. The user must still inspect the result, because wiggle can annotate unresolved conflicts and cannot prove semantic correctness. It also has merge, diff, extract, and browse modes; browse mode gives an ncurses-based inspection path for patches and conflicts.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

wiggle matters because it encodes a very Unixy idea: keep the format and workflow of patches, but make the recovery path smarter at word granularity. For package maintainers carrying downstream patches, that can be the difference between manually rewriting a patch and letting a small tool salvage most of it while clearly marking the rest.

Zeitleiste

• 2003-05-19: Neil Brown announced the first public release on LKML.
• 2010-2013: Maintained under Neil Brown's SUSE-era copyright line in the manual.
• 2018-2020: Later maintenance period reflected in the manual page copyright line.
• 2020-10-06: GitHub release records include v1.0 through v1.3, with v1.3 the latest listed release.

Related projects

• wiggle is related to `patch`, `merge`, line-oriented diff tools, and patch-stack workflows used by kernel and distribution maintainers. Its distinctive feature is word-wise alignment and conflict reporting rather than simply rejecting hunks.

Quellen

• https://github.com/neilbrown/wiggle - upstream repository overview
• https://github.com/neilbrown/wiggle/blob/master/wiggle.1 - upstream manual page
• https://github.com/neilbrown/wiggle/releases - upstream release list
• https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0305.2/0762.html - first public release announcement