Comment made by: jafingerhut
Just so you know, the preferred way to create and apply patches are the "git format-patch master --stdout > patch.txt" to create a patch (after doing the branching commands described on the JIRA workflow page to create a branch for your changes), and the "git am --keep-cr -s < patch.txt" to apply a patch. If a patch was created that way and applies cleanly with that command, then you are definitely good to go.
The "patch -p1 < patch.txt" command is just a secondary method sometimes used to try to apply patches that aren't in the format produced above, or have errors when applying using that method.