I am not sure if the following patches are still required.
brian@aquitard:~/tree/debian/mine/python-mysqldb/python-mysqldb$ ls -l debian/patches
total 16
-rw------- 1 brian brian 658 Nov 18 14:59 01_converters_boolean.patch
-rw------- 1 brian brian 630 Nov 18 14:59 03_converters_set2str.patch
-rw------- 1 brian brian 749 Nov 18 14:59 05_ssl.patch
I suspect I should remove them actually, and make the code the same as upstream. I suspect these patches are to resolve legacy issues and are no longer applicable.
Subversion seems to be very slow at doing the commit, or at least svn.debian.org is, so will try to work this out when it decides to wake up.