rules/base.xml.in contains a lot of repetitive closing/opening tags that renders a patch's usual three-line context useless for merging, sometimes causing mis-merges with submitted patches (for example, with bug #105168).

Perhaps a short line of text can be added to the rules[1] that tells people to use more lines by passing "-U <lines>" instead of "-u" to "diff"? Seven lines are usually sufficient for rules/base.xml.in.
  [1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/XKeyboardConfig/Rules/