quoted

 BTW, why do people insist on sending patches as attachments -- it makes
commenting them helly twisted, sigh... 

How true.  MIME - broken solution for a broken design ;)  More serious,
MIME makes sense when using a MUA that garbles patches like Netscape or
certain versions of Pine.

  Ralf  (Prolly still be using Mutt + vi in 5 years ...)

Patches as attachments are actually really convenient with Mutt.
You can view them seperately, extract and save them easily, etc.

To comment on both the original message and the attachments: use
view-attachments (v), use tag-entry (t) on all of the parts you want
quoted in your reply, and then use tag-prefix & reply (;r) 
(or ;g or whatever).

But I digress :)

-jim