Now that the Rails team has moved to using Lighthouse for bug, feature, and patch tracking, it’s a lot easier (and more fun) to track the patches coming in.
Just point your rss reader to: http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/events.atom and watch the action! I know that ton’s of people followed development when they were using Trac, it just wasn’t as nice.