patches in context format ?

I'm maintaining a git tree of the vim project: this work can be seen at http://github.com/cmichon/vim

vim patches do not come as unified format, but only as context format instead (from a "diff -c").

The current solution I have is to use the original patch command, stage modifications and add new files. I do not like this solution, because I have to work out the commit messages out of the mbox and I lose reproducibility. I'm basically maintaining a subset of shell scripts, the original patches and an artificial way (ugly) to get timestamps of modifications (for the commit dates).

Instead of this complicated procedure, I'd like to use "git apply" or "git am", provided I can get git to support "context output format" as input for patches ?

I guess the answer is no, but has anyone on the list been working on this ? is there another way to translate from "context" to "unified" format ?

TIA