As far as I can tell, the problem isn't the documentation, it's: make[3]: *** No rule to make target '/usr/lib/jvm/default-java/jre/lib/ppc64/libjawt.so', needed by 'bin/libvtkgdcmJava.so'. Stop.
Agreed, I didn't see this because I was scanning for "error:".The compilation failure is still unrelated to the patches though, because the patches only touch the C++ code, the compilation error is a result of some problem on the part that cmake does.
At the beginning of the build log one can even see that the library is correctly detected in the JRE ppc64el sub-directory, but later it wants ppc64 only and I can't find the according code in the gdcm VTK java module definition.
My suspect is SWIG_ADD_MODULE, but the according UseSWIG.cmake this is part of cmake-data and there was no change in stable. Swig2.0 might also be related, I saw it got two binary rebuilds on arm64 and one on ppc64el.
Best, Gert