Newbie maintainer, question regarding patches

[Michael Gmelin]

Hi,

I recently took over maintainership of the devel/ice port and trying to get familiar with the dos and don'ts of porting. In the past I contributed only by sending PRs, which would have been approved by the maintainer. Since I'm the maintainer now, will I still open normal PRs, which will then be taken by the committer? The Porter's Handbook seems a little bit thin on this (or I'm unable to distill .

Also I have an additional question regarding how to patch - as far as I understand, usually there should be one patch per patched file. I have the following situation changing the port:

a) I created a massive patch that enables the port to compile using modern compilers (gcc >= 4.7 and clang >= 3.0). Since this patch touches many files I was wondering if it wouldn't be better to keep this in one patch file instead of creating 20+ patch files which then have very little coherence (this patch fixes the same things in all files, as devel/ice violates the C++ standard in many places)

b) I also have another massive patch which touches another 20 files which enables some new security features in ice (the history of this patch is that I developed it at first and submitted it to the vendor, who refined it and sent it back to me). I might want to make this patch optional as well (using a dialog style menu to enable it). In this case it also seems like it would be better not to split the patch up to all that many sources, but keep it as one feature that's contained in one patch.

Especially when combining a) and b) (which both touch some of the same files and therefore will get more or less interleaved) it seems problematic (yet possible) to split them into many separate files.

So the general question is:
Is "one patch per file" a golden rule or are there exceptions in cases where one logical patch touches dozens of files?

Thanks,
Michael