Thanks coderus, you may laugh, but there are no other patches installed. In fact a fresh install of patchmanager after installing lipstick-jolla-home-qt5 DIR again. I appreciate what you are saying and I know you know your stuff. But there are no other patches installed. So, if it is not to do with the spec file, why th error warning about Line 2: in %preun section..??

Also, @schturman - how do I check that I created the patch correctly? - I have altered my unified_diff.patch several times, putting voljmecontrol qml diff first then compositor.qml and vice versa.........if I make the alterations manually, the idea works, but trying to patch it, it fails. Weird.