Many patches involve only lisp. In such cases, I (Teika kazura) 1. * make a backup copy of the lisp directory (/usr/share/sawfish/1.x.y/lisp/sawfish in my case), 2. * make two directories, 'trunk' and 'test', which are copies of the original, as a non-root. 3. * Make a symbolic link from the original to 'sawfish' in my private dir, 4. * and another symlink 'sawfish' chooses 'trunk' or 'test'. Don't forget to restart the sawfish! For a drastic change, running sawfish with a different user account, or under nested X server helps.