Maybe of interest to pkgsrc folks:

``One of the things I usually take care of as a Gentoo packages maintainer 
is sending patches to upstream developers. If a patch is applied upstream, 
we can remove it from future versions of a package so we have less work to 
do to maintain the package. Unfortunately, it seems that other 
distributions and packagers don't always do the same. This is true not 
only for Linux distributions such as Debian, Fedora Core, and SUSE, but 
also for maintainers of packages in places like FreeBSD's Ports, 
DarwinPorts or Fink. Here are some tips for developers on making things 
easier for yourself and everyone who has to touch your code.''

[http://programming.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/07/19/1713230&tid=53]


  - Hubert