Yeah the patch is fine, if you've run configure before. I hadn't as I was using a fresh tarball so it won't apply cleanly. If you were to "make distclean" prior to generating your diff, it would apply cleanly for someone who had just untar'd the 0.9.6 source
I am rebuilding my indexes now, this is exciting! I think with date ranges this would probably be good enough to go live with!