The best way to deal with this is to write a new patch (or many) that makes the upstream build system or code configurable enough that the Debian-specific patch isn't needed, get that new patch integrated upstream and then make those Debian-specific changes using options to ./configure (or its equivalent), or in a config file, or a separate package (an example is the desktop-base package). -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise