alien and --patch

[Andrew Nelson <freeandy@gmail.com>]

Hello all,

I'm creating .debs of the oracle-xe rpm.  Currently I'm able to create a .deb
package by asking alien to generate (--generate) the package directory,
modifying the oracle scripts to work with debian, and then running debian/rules
binary within the alien generated directory.

This all works fine, but I was hoping the --patch option to alien would allow me
to generate a patch so in the future I can do something like this:

alien --to-deb --patch mypatchfile.patch --test --scripts oracle-xe.rpm

This way I can create my patch file and send the patch to friends if they ever
need to generate a working .deb of the oracle-xe rpm.

Problem is I can't find any documentation explaining how this patch should be
generated.

So my question is this:

How do I generate a patch file that will work with alien's --patch option?

Thanks much for any help

//andy