For developer community information :
I launched at Val'EISTI a little project to get an automated patch reintegrator. The purpose of this tool is to help Moodle customizers to deal with upgrades.
This needs a preliminary requirement : the customizers need to have a clean patching activity marking with a reliable patch start and patch end sequence, cutting nicely within the core code.
The purpose of the tool is to make a global scan of the Moodle customized codebase, finding patches sequences and applying several heuristics upon an upgrade clean codebase do find the most probable reintegration location.
The heuristic will try to find a file with same name at same location, fails if not and will add this patch reintegration error into the failed logs.
Than would the heuristic try to find a matchable location within the file, pursuant it has not changed a lot in structure. Issue of which there are three : there is only one matching location (should be the good one), there are NO matching location, file has changed too much. Third case, there are several matching locations. Heuristic may be too loose and should be reinforced in tool configuration, or there is actually some kind of indecidability (should never !)...
An internship has been launched on this tool that will be programmed as a standalone CLI php script.
Cheers and let me know about ideas or comments....