Now I wonder how those creating BULL will handle it.
Given that Alexman is a developer of the game, and he has said their intentions was to have the effect of the UP, I'm gonna go with the UP for BULL and consider it an unreleased official bugfix. Anyone have any qualms with that?
Please, education me in the ways of patches.
Patching is generally done using programs like "diff" and "patch" from unix systems. Diff produces a single file that contains all of the changes across multiple files in a format that makes it clear where exactly in the file those changes occurred. There are many presentation formats, but the idea is that someone reading the output and looking at the original files can figure out how to make those changes themselves.
Then patch is used to apply those changes to a set of target files that are also modified versions of the original files. As long as the target files are close enough to the originals, patch can figure things out. Conflicts arise when both the new and target files were changed from the original in the same place.
Using a source control program to do this is essentially the same thing. I called it a trick only because applying external patches is not really the point of SVN, but it is an integral feature.