Versions distributed only as diffs?

[Paul Chvostek]

So...

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?

And while we're at it, what do I name this bugger?  The original source
was version "0.1.2.ds1" ... but the first diff brings this to
"0.1.2.ds1-2", and the second to "0.1.2.ds1-2.1".  Shall I just strip
out the alpha, and convert the remaining non-numerics to periods?  Or
just call this "0.1.2", and bump PORTREVISION when ds1-2.2 comes out?

Thanks.

-- 
  Paul Chvostek                                             <paul at it.ca>