On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 09:49:55PM +0200, Roland Illig wrote:
> That is, if you like it, you can continue to call your patches 
> patch-[a-z][a-z]. With the relaxed scheme, you may also call your 
> patches patch-[-A-Za-z0-9_]+. The decision whether to stick to the 
> [a-z][a-z] scheme or not would be left to the package author.

I'd suggest to following rules, if we want rules at all:
(1) Patches which are part of the normal package building are named
patches/patch-[a-z][a-z].
(2) Patches which are needed to maintain the package and which can't
follow (1) e.g. due to specific conflicts in the way the package works
or because they would add unwanted dependencies or which would add a
significant amount of build time are named manual-* and should be
somewhat descriptive. Special instructions can go into a manual.README
or so, as shown by libtool. This should be the exception though.
(3) Special temporary patches might be exempted from (1) when they are
needed for security or other releng related tasks only. It can make
sense to call a patch for a vulnerability patch-saXXXX if it applies
only to the branch etc.

Joerg