Patching and fuzz

> Indeed, pristine sources are a good idea but the rpmbuild tool is a slightly odd place to
> apply the patches.  Eventually a better way would be to use the distributed VCS of your
choice
> to maintain a source tree with your packaging customizations and pull the upstream sources
to
> it every so often.

Argh. That would be an absolute nightmare for collaboration and reuse by
others.

The great thing about source RPMs is that it is trivial for any third party to
see how the source differs from the upstream version. That makes it easy to
update to newer (or older) upstream versions, remove/update old patches, or
to pick up/review patches for upstream integration.