Refreshing patches

[Jonathan Nieder]

What is your work-flow for updating patches against new upstream versions?
The context: I built .debs based on recent upstream gpm by applying the
trickier of the Debian patches by hand and dropping them from the patch
queue. Now I am trying to build "the right way" by fixing the patches,
but I get nowhere.

If you want to see what nowhere looks like, you can check out

        http://home.uchicago.edu/~jrnieder/gpm.git messy/build

Note that anything that is neither in the "for-nico" branch nor in the
"for-debian" branch is likely to be completely insane.

My current method is almost certainly not the right one: I apply each
patch in turn, commiting the results; then I revert each patch, compare
the patch to a diff of the reverted and unreverted versions, and replace
the patch with the diff of the revert if it differs in any way outside
of the line numbers from the patch. Whenever I make a mistake, I cross
my fingers and hope that a rebase will save me from redoing everything.
It is very messy and I still have not succeeded in getting the patches
to apply cleanly after this process.

I probably will wait for the gpm release, in case the patches become
easier to update then (and to take a break). But I am curious to hear
what I should have been doing instead.