Add support for patches.json

Hey, let’s not do this.

Patches are meant to be a temporary fix for a single issue: the delay in maintainers responding and merging changes.
Relying on patches as a long-term solution would make the system unstable and unpredictable.

Now, imagine having 30 core patches listed in your composer.json, and then trying to install another module on shared hosting—it would be a headache for everyone! Let’s not open that Pandora’s box for Drupal CMS :)

Instead, let’s focus on finding a better way to speed up fix merges so we can avoid relying on patches in the first place.

I agree that it would be better if no one needed patches, but that is outside the scope of this issue. This issue is not even about Drupal CMS. It is about a bug in how Automatic Updates handles the Composer Patches extension. Trying to use this bug to force people to come up with an alternative to patching will turn more people off of Drupal rather than getting them to improve it.

I disagree. Most use cases for this module involve Drupal CMS. For anything else, we have Composer, which supports patches.
Drupal CMS must be user-friendly - even if that means imposing some limitations, so that workarounds like patches aren’t necessary to make it work.
However, if Drupal CMS is not mature enough to work as intended OOTB, then the Drupal community and core maintainers have a real problem.

The previous response illustrates why we need support for patches. Lots of bug fixes are blocked from coming to the attention of project maintainers by reviewers who argue against allowing them to be fixed. I hope the Automatic Updates maintainers agree that this project should not be limited to supporting Drupal CMS.

This works in my tests.

> Lots of bug fixes are blocked from coming to the attention of project maintainers by reviewers who argue against allowing them to be fixed.

Many bug fixes go unnoticed by project maintainers due to a lack of motivation for contributors to review them. This is the real problem that needs to be addressed, rather than relying on workarounds like patches.

If you maintain your codebase manually using Composer, patches, etc., then we can agree that, in some cases, applying patches (hacks) is the only urgent solution.
However, Drupal CMS is designed as a one-click installation that works out of the box (OOTB). It should not require any patching—otherwise, it cannot be considered a production-ready application.

By supporting patches in Drupal CMS, we shift the system’s focus away from content creators and towards developers, who will then have to manage all these patches instead.

Please allow someone else to review.