The Ruby source trees were initially checked in pristine such that a patch against the source tree can be easily generated with subversion. Use the following key: Ruby 1.8.5 rev 1 Ruby 1.8.6 rev 68 To generate a patch against 1.8.5, for example, run: svn diff -r1:HEAD http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace/ruby-1.8.5