patch upgrade for port committers?

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

When an update to a port is committed, it is likely to contain

(a)  lines like "Only in xxxx: yyyy"

or (b) patches that are created against empty files using the "-N" 
option for diff.

Cannot "patch" honor these cases?  As a port maintainer, I have been 
caught quite a few times by committers not adding or removing files from 
the "files" directory in a port.

Thanks, Stephen