"Local" is not good - I think patches should always go to CPAN (my CPAN patch directory is $CPAN/authors/id/S/SR/SREZIC/patches) and this patch should be references in the corresponding RT ticket. And then use a distropref to apply the patch when building the module locally. E.g.

--- 
comment: "bleadperl 31194 broke the test suite, also 5.00505 problems"
match:
  distribution: "^MSERGEANT/XML-Parser-2.34.tar.gz"
patches:
  - "SREZIC/patches/XML-Parser-2.34-SREZIC-01.patch"
[download]