how should custom patches be treated?

[avx]

In relation to one of my current bugs and this blog posting, I'd like to receive some comments on how custom - as in not officially supported by Gentoo - patches shall be handled and applied.

epatch_user() from eutils.eclass tries to apply all patches found in /etc/portage/patches/$cat/$name{-$ver}, which I'd personally prefer, but most ebuilds - at least of the ones I use - aren't supporting this, as of yet.

This approach would take the responsibility from the devs and put it into the hands of the user, but to properly use it, some kind of FEATURES="-user-patches" would be needed, so a recompile could easily be done without deleting or moving/renaming patches.

Then there's the way of filing bugs and hoping some dev will pick it up and make it the default, but that will mostly not happen, for valid reasons.

Also available is the way of a (local) overlay, which brings the problem of keeping it updated and also duplicates a certain amount of files.

Finally, there's the approach of building the required apps/libs completely by hand, which in addition to the overlay approach brings a lot of problems of general packagemanagement, such as clean remove, dep tracking, etc.

So I'd like to know, what is the roadmap for the future?
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[Etal]

It's currently being discussed on gentoo-dev.
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[avx]

Doh, thanks
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