Won’t say much, just wanted to drop a couple of links here as this site is a repository for stuff I don’t do extremely often and then find myself looking up again. Today I am cataloging these items…
Here is an excellent article on how to update modules. Simple and pretty much to the point!
How to Update a Module
Here is an equally useful article on how to apply patches in most linux operating systems:
How to Apply a Code Patch
These are two things that annoyed me to no end early in Drupal as there is a general assumption you know what to do. I will note on the patching one thing that might be confusing is where to place the file. I have found usually it should be placed in and ran from the directory of the module it is patching.
So lets say you have code patch for the “captcha” module. The patch file would then go in:
/drupalsiteroot/sites/all/modules/captcha/captchapatchfile.patch
Hope that is helpful!