Before starting to code:
Update your CVS tree, or alternatively download the latest snapshot
Copy this original tree, so you can make a patch against this tree
Before creating the patch:
Run make distclean && ./configure && make and test if it runs successfully
If you have the possibility do this both with gcc-2.95 and gcc-3.x as compiler
Now create the patch. Assuming that you have two directories, original-tree and my-tree:
Run make distclean in both trees
cd to the parent directory of both trees
Run diff -Naur original-tree my-tree | bzip2 -9c > patchbla.diff.bz2