Keyword: want
I'll agree the patch format has gotten rather unwieldy.
It's to be applied against the Wii64 public SVN.
The Wii64 Team hasn't rebased upon Mupen64Plus either. Backporting is trivial, and so we did.
And where is this "Wii64 public SVN"?
I can't find it anywhere. That is, I HOPE you are not referring to the Googlecode repo, because if you are....
On the Wii64 front, we managed to finish migrating the private SVN commits to the public googlecode repository up to Beta 1.1 Honey, so now you can see all of the individual commits and work that went into the last version.
That was posted on the blog dating back to 2010. Their last commit dates back to May 28, 2010 (nearly 4 years ago now !!!).
So if this is the last time stuff has been "migrated' from the private SVN to "public googlecode repo" - then it means the current sources are at least 4 years behind the private SVN.
If that is so, that doesn't seem like a serious commitment to open source to me - in fact, if it is exactly the opposite. This is exactly the same kind of lame crap that gets pulled in the N64 emu scene all the time - take original opensource code, fork it for some specific aim, close it up and pretend like you can get away with it and everything is just peachy. Pokefan did it with his Glide64 fork, ShunYuan did it, and there are countless other examples as well.
This is not how GPL derived code works. "Sharing" modifications is NOT an option that can be made by the devs - you are REQUIRED to share. If we all did things like this, projects would never progress.
If the Wii64 (or rather, their fork of Mupen) devs feel like they "have jobs now" and they have 'mortgages and bills to pay" and "there isn't a timeslot for Wii64", fine, you have moved on with your life, and now, pretty please, fork it over and let others pick up the baton. In fact, this decision is forced upon them - the GPL compels and demands you to fork it over - there is no "choice" to make here by them - only one right way to do it, and the current way they go about it seems like a very clear license violation to me.
And frankly, I'm surprised none of you have ever called them out on it.