The changes to HTNews.c broke the SSL patch. The other files have relatively small changes. I've been compiling lynx with SSL since 2.8.1rel.2 and until dev.15 I had no problems.
Patch is smart enough to catch the offsets and patch the files.
After the files are patched I have just to use diff to create an updated patch. Only once I had to do it by hand, in 2.8.2dev.2. Now things completely changed. The changes to HTNews.c in dev.16 directly affected the code for snews in the SSL patch. The only way I found to compile lynx was by not using the SSL patch for HTNews.c and by removing the snews code from HTTP.c.