Re your original question: have you checked patchutils? I haven't used it much, but grepdiff and splitdiff sound promising... Russell Coker wrote:
The problem is not just getting a list of changed files, it's extracting the patches for those files. In this case I'm working on the SE Linux policy patch for Fedora 17 which is 153,202 lines and 1335 files.
BTW, in recent years Debian addressed this by using quilt (from SuSE) and dpkg source format 3.0 [0] such that instead of foo_1.0.orig.tar.gz foo_1.0-1.diff.gz You have foo_1.0.orig.tar.gz foo_1.0-1.debian.tar.gz Where the latter is a tarball of the debian/ subdir and patches to the upstream tree are in logical chunks like debian/patches/017-hyphen-used-as-minus-sign Each such patch is also strongly encouraged to have DEP-3[1] metadata. Maybe Fedora also have somthing like that, and SE Linux policy is one of those packages that hasn't started using it yet. If not, maybe you should suggest such an approach to them! :-) PS: quilt and debian/source/format 3.0 are orthogonal, you can use one without the other. [0] documented in dpkg-source(1) manpage. [1] http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/