You may use certain package tracker such as paco to monitor your packages. Alternatively, you may even install apt and dpkg such that you LFS may work like Debian. The hints from www.linuxfromscratch.org has very detail instructions.
Did you not understand the purposes of using the patches? Some patches are only needed for the purpose of building LFS. In actual applications, you only need to read the installation instructions of the packages you want to install.