> I prefer to work with branches rather than a bunch of loose patch files The two are not mutually exclusive. You can have branches locally with the changes y

> I prefer to work with branches rather than a bunch of loose patch files The two are not mutually exclusive. You can have branches locally with the changes you're interested in and create patches from master to the tip of your branch. Same as a maintainer: you can apply patches in a different branch, check everything is alright and then merge it Patches only live in the mailing list and are not supposed to be manually handled on your machine