Patches are later corrections made to the source code after the public release announcement. As a rule, they are initiated by user feedback; their aim is to fix an installation problem concerning a particular platform or compiler version.
Patches are to be applied to the previously downloaded and unpacked full source distribution. Documentation patches can be applied to the binary (pre-compiled) distributions too.
bunzip2 polymake-VERSION-patchNN.bz2
cd polymake-VERSION make distclean
patch -p0 < DOWNLOAD_DIR/polymake-VERSION-patchNN