How to apply snapshot patches?

[Dmitry Semyonov <Dmitry Semyonov oktet ru>]

Hello.

Could anybody tell me a way to cleanly apply snapshot patches to
the reference (4.6.0) tree?

I'm doing

$ cd mc-4.6.0
$ patch -p4 < ../mc-4.6.0-2003-06-25-17.diff

and getting a lot of

"missing header for unified diff at line XXX of patch"

warnings. This makes me think something was wrong...


I think, an answer to the question should be placed somewhere
inside README file near *.diff.bz2 patch.


P.S. From the patch(1) manual:

       Tell  your  recipients  how  to apply the patch by telling
       them which directory to cd to, and which patch options  to
       use.   The  option  string -Np1 is recommended.  Test your
       procedure by pretending to be  a  recipient  and  applying
       your patch to a copy of the original files.


...Bye..Dmitry.