Those are git patches and apparently neither M-x epatch nor the command line version of patch can work with them. So I haven't actually tried it.
[...] will provide patches from the cvs tree with cvs diff -u (or do you prefer any other command?)
Helmut,
Here is a new patch I generated from a local copy of the CVS repo with the command 'cvs diff -b -u5 -N' (edited the contrib/CVS/Entries manually to make it catch new files).
I cleaned up the whitespace to 80 columns.
Let me know if it's OK.
João