Yes you can, apply them as you would normally do,but you may run into troubles. For example if you try to apply the patch that sends e-mail from the command line and the one that checks for new mail in incoming folders, the patch program will fail. The best thing you can do is to send me an e-mail explaining what you were trying to do. I will help you solve this problem.
 

See also:
How do I apply a patch?
How do I know if the patch was applied correctly?
 

I am happy to read your suggestions, to either write a new patch or to improve an existing patch.
 

Yes, there are a lot. I am trying to compile a source of patches in the web. I have come up with the this list
 

Because they are compressed files. Some browsers decompress the file for you but keep the original name intact, this means that when patch "name.patch.gz" is downloaded, you will see "name.patch.gz" in your computer, but the file "name.patch.gz" is not compressed anymore.

Not all browsers do this. Lynx is an example of a browser which will keep the file intact.

Also, I have thought of compressing the patches even more (using bzip), but as far as I know that is not fully deployed in all systems that Alpine is supported, and keeping two versions of the same patch increases the space that I am using to keep these patches, so I stick with ".gz extensions" for the moment.

The answer is not a simple one, but when new versions of Alpine appear it is handy to have such list, so I keep a list that tries to minimize the number of hunks that fail when more than one patch is applied. I am also trying to rewrite the patches so that they will minimize collisions. At this moment I am using the patch program that comes in RedHat 9.0 to do this. I hope other patch programs behave similarly. The list is in the file README.upgrade
 

See also:
What is a hunk?

This has to do with the past. When I started writing patches my diff program could not create a unified patch, the "-U" option was not available and attempts to build a newer diff program failed. However, the patch program understood the -U option. This was in a TRU64 machine, which was very old, so I decided that context was a more viable option, because of the clarity and support by other programs. I guess now I am stuck with my choice.

Yes, you may. All patches for a specific version are located in the same directory and conversely, all patches in the same directory are for the same version. I am trying to add descriptions for all patches, so that it will be easy to identify them for anyone. The patches for version X.YZ are in http://alpine.x10host.com/alpine/patches/alpine-X.YZ/ .

This site is provided for free, both by the host and the service provided in this site. Since there is no charge for this, I have to abide by some restrictions that are imposed on this service. One of those rules is that I can not distribute files that are bigger than 5 MB. Compressing the source code of Alpine using gzip or bunzip would produce files that are bigger than 5 MB, so I first tried the lzma format, and it worked, so I decided to use that. However, some people pointed out that lzma was superseeded by xz, so I distribute both formats now. In practice the lzma version is less than 1K smaller than the xz version.

In order to decompress alpine-X.YZ.tar.lzma use the command