Leonid Mamchenkov has an interesting post to his site detailing a plugin for the popular Composer package management tool that makes it easier to apply patches to the current version of libraries in use: composer-patches

composer-patches is a plugin for Composer which helps with applying patches to the installed dependencies. It supports patches from URLs, local files, and from other dependencies.

This plugin makes it so that, during the normal Composer installation flow, you can apply your own patches to fix functionality that may not be corrected upstream yet. It replaces the need to "fork and fix" in your own version of the repository and cleans up the process to a more automated flow. It can also help when working with multiple people on the same code that's not your own and apply their patches to evaluate their changes.

You can find more information about the composer-packages plugin in the README on its GitHub repository.