Comment by skydhash

Maybe I can't understand what TFA is describing, but from what I know a patch is usually tied to a specific commit, so a very specific point of time in the upstream lifetime. It does not make sense to have it lingering longer than that. Even in the case when you want to maintain a set of patches (package building,...) you usually revise it every new version of the software. In this case, the intent is much more important than the how (which quickly become history).