[Balloon] Typical kernel hacking workflow on the Balloon boa…

I am curious to learn what the typical workflow is for folks who hack
the kernel on the Balloon board. What I have been doing seems prone
to error and lossage and I'm sure there must be something easier.

Anyway, I've checked out svn trunk and run through the build process
to generate a kernel.

Now I want to change something, say perhaps, the NOR flash
partitioning that's defined in balloon.c. Thus far, I've simply been
hacking away at
build/kernel//linux-2.6.37.6/arch/arm/mach-pxa/balloon3.c.

I already know I'm in trouble because I forgot to do a "quilt new" and
to "quilt add" balloon.c before I started modifying it.

What do folks do when they realize they've modified a file that is not
under quilt control? Or is this just a newbie mistake that none of
you make anymore?

Of course, since it's in the build directory, even once I get the file
properly under quilt control, I still need to remember to copy the
patch & series files out of the build directory and into the
packages/kernel directory tree, right?

Or is there some easier way to do this?

I feel like I know what all needs to be done, but what needs to be
done seems ridiculously, tediously, error proneously difficult. Am I
just a whiner, or do you all have tips and tricks that make this
easier? Or am I just going about this the wrong way to begin with?

--wpd