My 2-bits, for what it's worth...
I like the idea of having one pristine source tarball, plus a PKG-VER-REL specific patch file(s). For downloading. This means changes from one release to the next don't require downloading another large-ish source tarball, but simply a (hopefully) smaller patch file. Once downloaded, I think the process (whether automated or human-driven-but-well-documented) should end up creating a PKG-VER-REL directory for the patched source. This makes it easy to hack at it, build it (either in a sub-dir or separately), and still start fresh when the next Cygwin-REL patch is downloaded. Regarding automated vs human-driven, I'd vote for as fully automated as possible. But the people that are interested in grabbing source and hacking at it should be capable of following directions also, as long as they are easy to find. Regarding where in the source package to keep a .README file, I think it should be up to each package maintainer. There should be a "standard" suggestion, in case they don't already have something else in place (e.g. CYGWIN-PATCHES). However, for those upstream sources that already have a place to keep system-specific files (in my case, curl-7.9.1-1/packages/Win32/cygwin) that should be the right place. The best way to FIND this .README file would be to look in the binary distro for usr/doc/Cygwin/pkg-ver-rel.README, which should document the non-standard place where the master copy is located... --Kevin