how best to maintain a patch

[David Coe <david.coe@someotherplace.org>]

I'm looking for advice/experience if you can help:

We have a patch to ispell, submitted to one of the
open bugs, which upstream maintainer has decided
isn't important enough to incorporate into the
upstream versions -- but is (apparently) needed 
for non-i386 (Alpha, at least) compatibility in 
Debian.  

So I think I'll create a source patch file
and add a rule to debian/rules to apply it 
for each build.  The alternative, of course, 
would be to just apply the patch once to 
the working source tree, and let the .deb 
system handle it.

I think I like the separate patch file better,
though, because it'll be easier to keep this
patch separate from other patches made for
other purposes, when migrating to newer releases
of upstream source.

Is that wrong?  If not, do we have a standard
or common way of naming such patch files?

Thanks.