Patching the data files

[Вячеслав]

While looking into pstypes.h in order to compile freespace with full
data support I noticed that there is|was some special tuning for French
and German versions of Freespace. Additionally, the web page at icculus
says that it is important to patch the data to ver. 1.2.

Now I've got a problem.

I have a full 1.0 version of Freespace2 with Russian Launcher. The patch
distributed at freespace.com (fs21x-12.exe) fails to upgrade this
complaining about localized "Freespace2.exe". As far as I know, only the
Windows .exe and the possibly "Root_fs2.vp" are changed. 

Linux binary runs seemingly OK with my data (showing English) but spits
out tons of debug messages (when NDEBUG is off). Is it reliable enough
to play 1.0 data to the end or I should expect something horrible as I
advance through the missions? 

Can I patch the .vp files without ever dealing with Win32 and its weird
.exe stuff? Can someone make an xdelta diff to patch the data properly
within Linux (or unpatch my exes to make the windows patcher work)?