You should get rid of them to provide more metadata about this software.
debian/patches: 19 patches to forward upstream
low
Among the 19 debian patches
available in version 4.8.7-3 of the package,
we noticed the following issues:
19 patches
where the metadata indicates that the patch has not yet been forwarded
upstream. You should either forward the patch upstream or update the
metadata to document its real status.
![[bug history graph]](https://qa.debian.org/data/bts/graphs/s/starjava-topcat.png){kind=link}