2008/9/5 Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org
It is, alas, harder to create and update custom-patched packages than whipping together quickie patch && configure && make && make install scripts.
However packages are usually nicer to deploy, since the package manager can deal with dependencies, and our customized packages don't need to conflict confusingly with the ones in the base distro. New-server installation is faster and easier; particularly for servers which don't maintain state data -- like plain Apache/PHP boxes and Squid proxies -- installation and upgrades are a cinch.
Why don't you then build custom packages with your patches inside? apt-build and friends (dh_make) should do the trick, at least for Ubuntu.
marco