Josh> The issue isn't that, it's that git apply is just buggy and Josh> can't tell the difference between a new file and a modified Josh> one.
It's not the fault of git apply; the patch contained explicit annotations on all the files claiming that they were new. Both the patches I've looked at so far (picksplit NaNs and enable_material) had the same defect.
The question is, how are these submitters preparing their patches?
I used "git diff" configured to use src/tools/git-external-diff, as described here: