(Note: 2.0pre2 in build mode is not backwardly compatible with Patch Maker 0.75. Users will need to upgrade, as the format of chromelist.txt has changed.)
Patch Maker is a Perl script for managing patches. It has two separate but related functions - it can work in one of two modes.
In this mode, which is most generally applicable, Patch Maker manages and tracks multiple patches to a bit of software. It uses unique tags (patch references, e.g. bug numbers) to separate patches, knows what files are in each patch, and can perform operations on them. Basically, it speeds up by a factor of ten the process of creating, diffing, uploading, refreshing, and checking in a patch.
There are instructions for using Patch Maker in CVS mode.
In this Mozilla-specific mode, which is triggered if you are sitting in the chrome directory of a Mozilla build install point, you can make patches to Mozilla chrome without needing a CVS tree. This lowers the barrier to entry for bug fixing.
There are simple instructions for using Patch Maker in build mode. Although the code is unified, the documentation is not yet :-) I would love to hear from any Patch Maker users who would like to help out with this task.
For the confused: there was Patch Manager, which I wrote for myself, and released version 1.0. That just did the CVS stuff. I plugged it in a few places, but no-one really noticed. While interning with Netscape, working full-time for mozilla.org, I adapted that code into a new product, Patch Maker, for the Mozilla nightly build functions. That made it to version 0.75. Then, I remerged them, and leveraged Patch Maker's brand awareness ( ;-) ) to make Patch Maker version 2.0 and above, which does both.
I hope that's clear.