Instead of recompiling the source and installing it again, is there a way to monkey patch the already existing package? It seems like a few lines of code.
That would be incredibly complicated and crash-prone to do.
With nice distros like gentoo, you can just drop the .patch file into an apropriate folder and it'll be applied with every re/install/upgrade
I'd rather more like to imagine a software packaging/distribution regimen whereby dropping a patch(1)-compatible patch file into "an appropriate folder" meant that it would instantly take effect the very next time you run the program.
you can recompile and not install it anywhere, just run the binary you compiled yourself.