Modifying other people's software
5 comments
·August 14, 2025thwarted
The process described reminded me of "pristine source" and RPM spec files that take the upstream pristine source and patch it during the build process. Maintaining that is always a little bit of a headache if you don't do it regularly, especially having to maintain (generate and apply) a separate set of patch files for the changes and express/apply the patches in the spec file. This looks to make light work of that.
datadrivenangel
Modifying source code like this is one method. For web software, bookmarklets are another great way to do that.
bartread
I’m a big fan of Greasemonkey scripts for this, although these days I prefer Violentmonkey because it has several capabilities that the OG doesn’t.
cyberax
This is supercool. One my constant problem with self-hosting is that I often need to modify just a couple of files here and there, but then I'm stuck with a forked repo or a dirty work copy.
I'm going to try to make a frontend UI for it.
Many times I've just patched the binary even if source is available, because trying to reproduce the binary you currently have, with only the changes you want and everything else the same, can be an even more difficult exercise than simply changing a string or constant.