I am not maintaining packages in Fedora. But my work is related to building them for AArch64 architecture. And this means editing patches and/or adding new ones…
When I was doing AArch64 bootstrap in OpenEmbedded it was easy. Altering Debian/Ubuntu packages was also simple task. Why? Because in both situations patches are applied in developer friendly way so it is visible which ones are applied in which order and (as quilt is used) they are also easy to refresh and edit.
But not in Fedora. Here we have %setup and %patch macros which use workflow from 80’s. Yes, patch <px file.patch is not modern way of handling patches which may need work. especially when you first fetch and install all build dependencies just to get build failed cause nth patch does not fully apply. or when your work requires to alter patches 3rd, 7th and 13th.< p>
Sure, there is %autosetup macro which should solve a problem. But it does not. There are packages where some patches are reverse applied or with other patch level than 1. I saw also ones where there is extra directory change during applying diffs.
So dear package maintainers — please migrate to %autosetup (with quilt or git) to make life of other developers easier. I think that there will be more people satisfied when this will happen than just me.