[Lazarus] OT: beginner question about best way to develop

[Lubos Pintes]

Hi,
I have Lazarus SVN repo. Occasionally I do svn up and then rebuild.
Say I made some changes and test them. Say in ideal case, I would like 
to send a patch for possible inclusion. So I do
svn diff >patch.txt
However, my test patch contains files I never touched, and I don't 
understand why. Here it is for reference (approx. 9400 bytes)
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5629472/patch.txt
Only last 6 lines are mine. So what happened in my copy of repo?
I am using cygwin on windows 7 pro 64 bit. Is it possible that it messes 
file dates so they look like changed?

Also, it is a good idea to make small changes and document them. I 
however have almost no experience with this. Could I import a copy of 
repo for example to git and do the commits there? And what about syncing 
with original SVN?
I "simply" need a basic way to track changes and possibly generate and 
send some patch in the future.
Many thanks for any help!