Some time ago, the brilliant GitHub people gave me the following tip. Rajarshi is lazy, and might find it interesting. By appending .patch to the commit URL, a commit can easily be downloaded as patch. That way, developers can easily download it with wget or curl and apply it locally with git am, without having the fetch the full repository.

For example, Dmitry made this commit in his branch, having the URL https://github.com/dmak/cdk/commit/9b0478d50c7b5ca10f77fb01d89329db5fe80625. The patch for this commit can then be downloaded at this URL https://github.com/dmak/cdk/commit/9b0478d50c7b5ca10f77fb01d89329db5fe80625.patch.

This post was originally posted as https://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2011/01/github-tip-download-commits-as-patches.html.