Using the recurse (
<option>-r
</option>) option to
<citerefentry><refentrytitle>diff
</refentrytitle><manvolnum>1
</manvolnum></citerefentry> to generate patches is fine, but please look at the resulting patches to make sure there is no unnecessary junk in there. In particular, diffs between two backup files,
<filename>Makefile
</filename>s when the port uses
<command>Imake
</command> or GNU
<command>configure
</command>, etc., are unnecessary and have to be deleted. If it was necessary to edit
<filename>configure.in
</filename> and run
<command>autoconf
</command> to regenerate
<command>configure
</command>, do not take the diffs of
<command>configure
</command> (it often grows to a few thousand lines!). Instead, define
<literal>USES=autoreconf
</literal> and take the diffs of
<filename>configure.in
</filename>.