Thanks Ross, but no sticky bits :( It's actually the group of the patched files that gets changed to root and not the owner (sorry).

michael#/opt/oe/build/tmp/work-shared/gcc-4.8.2-r0/gcc-4.8.2$ ll
total 11M
drwxr-xr-x 36 michael michael 4.0K Oct 30 20:02 ./
drwxr-xr-x  4 michael michael 4.0K Oct 30 20:02 ../
-rw-r--r--  1 michael michael  38K Jul  4  2003 ABOUT-NLS
drwxr-xr-x  2 michael michael 4.0K Oct 30 20:02 autom4te.cache/
drwxr-xr-x  7 michael michael 4.0K Oct 16  2013 boehm-gc/
-rw-r--r--  1 michael michael 540K Oct 16  2013 ChangeLog
-rw-r--r--  1 michael michael 3.2K May 13  2004 ChangeLog.tree-ssa
-rwxr-xr-x  1 michael michael 3.7K Aug 22  2009 compile*
drwxr-xr-x  2 michael michael 4.0K Oct 16  2013 config/
-rwxr-xr-x  1 michael michael  45K Oct 30 20:02 config.guess*
-rw-r--r--  1 michael michael  25K Mar 22  2011 config-ml.in
-rwxr-xr-x  1 michael michael  15K Feb 13  2011 config.rpath*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 michael michael  35K Oct 30 20:02 config.sub*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 michael root    462K Oct 30 20:02 configure*
-rw-r--r--  1 michael root    101K Oct 30 20:02 configure.ac
...

This happens on other patched files as well. My machine is Ubuntu 12.04.05 x86_64.

Michael Gloff