[consulting] Patching code on client's site, and general packaging of customizations

[Gary Feldman]

Here's a real beginner's (consulting) question:

How do you handle cases where there's a bug that you need fixed for a 
customer long before any fix will show up in CVS?  Or there's a change 
that can't be done via a hook?

Short term, you can just go ahead and make the change on the customer's 
site, but that doesn't scale.  Every time you do an update, you need to 
worry about keeping those changes.  I've been tracking my changes in a 
personal Subversion repository, but it's still not particularly 
efficient.  (Looking at some of the tools layered on top of Subversion 
is on my list of things to do.)

On a more general, related note:  How do you package up customizations?  
For themes, poor man's inheritance works ok.  For hooks, a simple 
obvious approach is to create a custom module for any given client, and 
put the hooks (form alters, etc.) there.  This works, but doesn't feel 
right to me.  I have yet to do anything large enough to justify a 
dedicated module for a specific feature, so this general module turns 
into a grab bag of miscellaneous hooks.

Gary