The best plan is to use whatever directory organization floats your boat,
and then massage the patches. Start with 'yum install patchutils'.
Then usually you want something like
diff -rpuNB --exclude={'*~','*.orig'} kernel-2.5.24{.orig,} |
filterdiff --remove-timestamps --strip=2 --addprefix=linux-2.6/ > foo
Enjoy,
Roland