Versions distributed only as diffs?

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Oct 28), Curtis Jewell said:
> On Sat, 28 Oct 2006, Paul Chvostek wrote:
> >I'm looking at porting a debian package whose source appears to be
> >distributed as an older version plus a couple of diffs to bring the
> >old source to the current stable version.
> >
> >The two diffs, uncompressed, are about 101KB.
> >
> >Should I add slightly-modified versions of these diffs as patches in
> >the port's files directory, making a 104KB port?  That seems awfully
> >heavy. Or should I make distfiles of the original diffs, and write
> >some Makefile magic in post-patch to apply them to the older source
> >distfile? Is there a precedent for this?
> 
> editors/vim does the second with about 90 small patches. So yes, there's 
> precedent.

Why not just treat them as plain old patches and list them in
PATCHFILES?  misc/mmv and net/sniffit do this (with a single patch, but
the same idea applies).

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com