Visual patch manager?

[Richard Dale]

Reading the various posts about problems with patching the latest
KDevelop1.0beta4, I was thinking that a visual patch managing tool would be
really useful. I don't know if  there is such a thing already. I only
discovered 'kpackage' yesterday after having been using KDE since August :-( .
Lots of KDE things things seem to be missing from the Red Hat/LinuxPPC version
that I have.

I work on my changes to KDevelop in a directory called 'kdevelop-1.0beta4objc',
and I keep a vanilla version in 'kdevelop-1.0beta4'. When I want to create a
patch I have to clear out all the '.o' files etc in kdevelop-1.0beta4objc so
diff doesn't include them in the patch. Then of course you test the patch, find
you've made a mistake, and have to build all the '.o' files again, test the fix
to the patch, remove the '.o' files and so on.

I would like to be able to have a visual tool (invoked from KDevelop?) which
would create a patch of 'kdevelop-1.0beta4objc' against ''kdevelop-1.0beta4',
ignoring junk files. Then put up a little editor window to format a time stamp
and programmer's name with the change log at the front of the patch.

Then the same tool might keep a catelogue, like kpackage of what's there and
help install them. Perhaps this functionality could go in kdiff or kmerge - or
perhaps a standalone tool?

I've only recently been using the 'patch' utility, but I find it really
useful.

-- Richard