The best practice is to find some way to implement your feature that does not require patching the original core. You should try to read - http://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/59054/why-dont-we-hack-core Anyway, if you still want (or need) to maintaining your Drupal Core with a patch you can use any of this projects to manage your patches. - https://github.com/davereid/drush-patchfile > This project seeks to solve the following problems: > > - How do I document what patches I've applied to a project? > - How do I reliably know what patches are applied or not without manually checking every single one? >- How can I be reminded that I need to reapply a patch after downloading a module update? - https://github.com/xendk/bandaid > Drush tool for helping with patch management on Drupal, which helps > with patching, and upgrading modules.