A while ago we borrowed code developed to support the "bulk change" functionality within the layer index to lib/oe/recipeutils.py in OE-Core. Since then the code has improved massively. The bulk change function works with master so in order to produce more accurate patches we could switch to calling into the OE code instead of having an effective outdated copy of it in the layer index - we'd just have to do an initial step in bulkchange.py where we checkout bitbake and OE-Core before calling into it.
I've implemented this as part of the move to support Django 1.11: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/layerindex-web/commit/?id=c356f74b4eb73ddbab8bd3dd514f3758481edcf9 http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/layerindex-web/commit/?id=351a2526d60238ee67b7cf363578e9bc152a26cb Marking resolved accordingly.