Applying a series of Debian patches to an original source

Say you have a nice original source package, as well as bunch of extra Debian patches, which you want to apply to that source (for instance, you may want to compile Debian's grub 2.00-22 using the tarballs you picked here.

However, since Debian uses quilt, or whatever it's called, to automate the application of a series of patches, and you either don't have it on your system or don't want to bother with it (since you're only interested in the patches), you end up wanting to apply all the files from the patches directory of the .debian addon, and there's of course no way you'll want to do that manually.

The solution: Copy the patches/ directory from the Debian addon to the root of your orig source, and run the following shell script.

#!/bin/bash
while read p; do
  patch -p1 < ./patches/$p
done < ./patches/series

By Grabthar's hammer, what a timesaver!

Compiling Grub4DOS on MinGW

Since chenall committed a handful of patches that I submitted to make the compilation of Grub4DOS on MinGW easier, I'm just going to jolt down some quick notes on how you can produce a working Grub4DOS on Windows.
Note that part of this guide is shamelessly copied from the RMPrepUSB Grub4DOS compilation guide.

• If you don't already have a git client, download and install msys-git (a.k.a. "Git for Windows") from here.
• Download the latest MinGW32 installer (mingw-get-setup.exe) by clicking the "Download Installer" button on the top right corner of the main MinGW site.
• Keep the default options on the first screen (but you can change the destination directory if you want)
• On the package selection screen, select
• mingw-developer-toolkit
• mingw-base
• msys-base
• Select menu Installation → Apply Changes and click Apply
• Now navigate to your msys directory, e.g.. C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\, and open the file etc\profile in a text editor.
• Assuming that you installed msys-git in C:\Program Files (x86)\Git, change the following:

  if [ $MSYSTEM == MINGW32 ]; then
    export PATH=".:/usr/local/bin:/mingw/bin:/bin:$PATH"
  else
    export PATH=".:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/mingw/bin:$PATH"
  fi

  to

  if [ $MSYSTEM == MINGW32 ]; then
    export PATH=".:/usr/local/bin:/mingw/bin:/bin:/c/Program Files (x86)/Git/bin:$PATH"
  else
    export PATH=".:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/mingw/bin:/c/Program Files (x86)/Git/bin:$PATH"
  fi

  This is to ensure that your system will be able to invoke git. Of course, if you use a different git client, you can ignore this step.
• Download nasm (current build is: http://www.nasm.us/pub/nasm/releasebuilds/2.11.06/win32/nasm-2.11.06-win32.zip) extract and copy nasm.exe to C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin (the other files in the zip archive can be discarded).
• Download upx (current build is: ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/sourceforge/u/up/upx/upx/3.91/upx391w.zip) extract and copy upx.exe to C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin (the other files in the zip archive can be discarded).
• In C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\ launch msys.bat
• In the shell that appears, issue the following command (this may be necessary to locate mingw-get):

  /postintall/pi.sh

  You should accept all the default options.
• Now issue the following commands:

  mingw-get upgrade gcc=4.6.2-1
  mingw-get install mpc=0.8.1-1

  This will effectively downgrade your compiler to gcc 4.6.2, which is necessary as gcc 4.7 or later doesn't seem to produce a working grldr for the time being.
• Download the latest Grub4DOS source from github by issuing the following command

  git clone https://github.com/chenall/grub4dos.git

  Note: By default this will download the source into C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\home\<your_user_name>\grub4dos\, but you can of course navigate to a different directory before issuing the git clone command if you want it elsewhere.
• Run the following commands:

  cd grub4dos
  ./autogen.sh
  make

At the end of all this, you should end up with a grldr and grldr.mbr in the C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\home\<your_user_name>\grub4dos\stage2\ directory, which is what you want

IMPORTANT: Do not try to invoke ./configure directly on MinGW, as compilation will fail. Instead should ensure that you call autotools to re-generate configure and Makefiles that MinGW will be happy with. Note that you can run ./bootstrap.sh instead of ./autogen.sh, if you don't want configure to be invoked with the default options.

What's the deal with gcc 4.7 or later on MinGW?

I haven't really investigated the issue, but the end result is that grldr is 303 KB, vs 307 KB for gcc 4.6.2, and freezes at boot after displaying:

A20 Debug: C806 Done! ...

I'm getting an error about objcopy during the configure test...

That's because you're not listening to what I say and try to compile a version of Grub4DOS that doesn't contain the necessary updates for MinGW. You must use a version of the source that's more recent than 2014.11.14 and right now, that source is only available if you clone from git.

Dude, could you, like, also provide the steps to compile from Linux?

Sigh... Alright, since I'm a nice guy, and it's a lot simpler, I'll give you the steps for a bare Debian 7.7.0 x64 Linux setup:

aptitude install gcc glibc-devel.i686 gcc-multilib make autotools autoconf git nasm upx
git clone https://github.com/chenall/grub4dos.git
cd grub4dos
./autogen.sh
make

Happy now? Note that the Linux compiled version is usually a lot smaller than the MinGW32 compiled one.

Visual Studio 2013 has now become essentially free...

See http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-community-vs.

I'm just going to point out to the first 2 paragraph of the license terms:

1.   INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS.

a.   Individual license. If you are an individual working on your own applications to sell or for any other purpose, you may use the software to develop and test those applications.

b.   Organization licenses. If you are an organization, your users may use the software as follows:

• Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test your applications released under Open Source Institute (OSI)-approved open source software licenses.
• Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test your applications as part of online or in person classroom training and education, or for performing academic research.
• If none of the above apply, and you are also not an enterprise (defined below), then up to 5 of your individual users can use the software concurrently to develop and test your applications.
• If you are an enterprise, your employees and contractors may not use the software to develop or test your applications, except for open source and education purposes as permitted above. An “enterprise” is any organization and its affiliates who collectively have either (a) more than 250 PCs or users or (b) more than one million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in annual revenues, and “affiliates” means those entities that control (via majority ownership), are controlled by, or are under common control with an organization.

Basically, this means that even if you're a corporate user, you can legally install and use Visual Studio Community Edition, on any computer you want, to compile and/or contribute to Open Source projects, and this regardless of your company's internal policies regarding the installation of Software (otherwise any company could enact an internal policy such as "Microsoft software licenses don't apply here" to be entitled to install as many unlicensed copies of Windows as they like).
So I have to stress this out very vehemently: If a company or IT department tries to take your right to download and install Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition to compile or test Open Source projects, THEY ARE IN BREACH OF THE LAW!
The only case where you are not entitled to use Visual Studio Community Edition is if you're developing a closed source application for a company. But who in their right mind would ever want to do something like that anyway?... ;)

So all of a sudden, you no longer have to jump through hoops if you want to recompile, debug and contribute to rufus, libusb or libwdi/Zadig - simply install Visual Studio 2013, as you are fully entitled to (because all these projects use an OSI approved Open Source license), and get going!

Oh, and for the record, if you want to keep a copy of Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition, for offline installation, you should run the installer as:

vs_community.exe /layout

Note however that this will send you back 8 GB in terms of download size and disk space.