I was going to say we also need to check for patches of components, but I see this is actually solved in the easyblock in that case. However, that solution can be problematic as the patch then has to appear in the parent bundle directory and in a directory for the individual component (see easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs@6afd169 for an example)

I also note that the patches are also required for the repo try/except loop above (line 5122)

Good catch! I've done the same for the code that copies the patches to a central repo.

This looks good, but since it does indeed look pretty trivial to add the patches to the reprod directory I would also do that while we are here.

So you want to copy them to both directories? It is currently rather confusing which file ends up where, and it's going to duplicate some things, so shouldn't we first decide on a proper structure for this easybuild//reprod dir?

This looks good, but since it does indeed look pretty trivial to add the patches to the reprod directory I would also do that while we are here.

So you want to copy them to both directories? It is currently rather confusing which file ends up where, and it's going to duplicate some things, so shouldn't we first decide on a proper structure for this easybuild//reprod dir?

Not going to delay this to figure that out. IMO the correct place is the reprod directory, but the bigger issue is that right now what is in the reprod directory does not actually work in some cases, fixing that is its own PR.

Note that this bug fix introduced a new bug that pops up when installing an easyconfig with an extension that has a patch. See #4959 (comment) for more details, and a fix is implemented in #4960.