You know, you don't have to switch to the entire 'stable' branch. Just apply the patch linked to in my last comment. It doesn't rely on anything outside arc3.1.
Anarki has multiple branches: http://i.imgur.com/WefAVGX.png. Notice the branches 'official' and 'stable'. 'Official' is just the various releases of arc, and 'stable' is releases + small bugfixes. To see what's changed in 'stable' since arc3.1, look at the list of commits: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/commits/stable. There's only 15 commits or so on that page after the arc3.1 release, and you can click on them to see what was changed. Scanning the list, really there's no other important bugfixes.
I keep a directory called arc3.1 by doing:
$ git clone http://github.com/arclanguage/anarki arc3.1
$ cd arc3.1
$ git branch -a # list all branches
$ git checkout stable
I can then see the same list of commits by typing 'git log'. Or generate diffs by typing:
$ git diff remotes/origin/official
This is enough information for you to create and manage a repo just how you described. I have a slightly different itch, so I have a different approach: http://github.com/akkartik/arc. Back before me, a user called aw created a new approach as well: http://awwx.ws/hackinator, which I doubt is actively maintained. You should create one too and show us. If it's substantially better we'll switch to it. Over time.
I'm sure everything could be much better. (I'm trying to create a new way to organize programs, after all: http://akkartik.name/about.) But no matter how you organize programs, people would still need to know about some baseline tools, like diff and patch and scripts in your description above. For anarki you need to learn some git at the moment.
