development best practices

hi all,

i'm fairly new to openbsd. and i've run into the following problem,
where i want to hack a project (most recently trying to fix a possible
issue with i3status), but building the from the git source
tree fails.

now, in the specific case, i'm trying to build a version that,
also exists in ports, so we know it can be built on openbsd; and i
presume the various patches included with the port are what makes it
work.

i could of course try to apply those patches and fix my issue. but then
when i submit a PR upstream i'd have to remove them again. that seems
cumbersome, expecially if done repeatedly.

so what is the best practice in this situation? should i just upstream
the ports patches?

thanks.

--
cheers,
björn