On Dec 20, 9:57, Martin Buchholz wrote: I always add -pN to patch, otherwise it will *always* patch all files in the top directory. Try adding -p0. I haven't used patch 2.5 much, but in older versions 'patch' would understand the Index line, but only to a limited extent: If there was a file in the top directory then it would patch that one instead.. only if the file was unique would it patch it where it should be patched. Gave me a lot of problems with ChangeLog and Makefile :-) Patch was thus never very good with Index files anyway, so CVS was fixed instead. More below. The newer versions of CVS *do* generate these diffs. I just tried to generate a diff from the xemacs CVS repository, it generated the old diff so it looks like what matters is which version the server is using (all diffs I generate from my own repositories are good). I don't remember when this was fixed in CVS but I recommend upgrading the server to something like 1.10.7 at least. -Tor p.s. Somebody wrote a script to fix those old cvs diffs and posted it on info-cvs. If it's out of the question upgrading CVS then I could try to dig it out.