Suggestions on packaging a patched source tarball

[Cesare Falco]

Hi there,

I'm facing an unusual situation. I'm already packaging sdlmame from
a .zip upstream file. Well, you didn't know? Please review it:
http://revu.tauware.de/details.py?upid=259
:)

Now I'm considering to package another Mame derivative, namely WolfMame,
which is distributed as a patch to the baseline code. I wonder what is
the correct way to handle this:

1. I should download the sdlmamexxx.zip upstream tarball, uncompress and
patch it with the wolfmamexxx.zip set of patches and finally build a
wolfmame_xxx.orig.tar.gz

*or*

2. use sdlmamexxx.zip upstream tarball to build a
wolfmame_xxx.orig.tar.gz and then patch it during the package build
process (ugly IMHO)

*or*

3. add a patching system to my existing maintainer scripts in the
sdlmame package and build another binary right from it

*or*
4. I'm waiting for your suggestions, they will be highly welcome ;)

Thanks in advance!
Cesare.