Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!sce!graham From: graham@sce.UUCP (Doug Graham) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: PATCH usage Message-ID: <393@sce.UUCP> Date: 29 Jun 88 06:57:21 GMT Article-I.D.: sce.393 Organization: Systems Eng., Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Lines: 25 I was applying the last few patches for "patch" today, and had quite some trouble because one of the patches got mangled in the mail. I finally got it figured out, but spent quite some time doing it. In the course of doing so, I noticed that the latest patch (patch-10, haven't got 11 yet) is 80K bytes, while the entire source for "patch" is only about 120K bytes. Does this make sense? Would it not be more reasonable to just post the entire thing again with the patches installed? Then it wouldn't be necessary to hunt around for previous patches to bring it up to patchlevel 9 so that 10 could be applied. In a similar vein, I noticed that when "perl" first appeared on the net, it was immediately followed by a large number of patches. (Around 25 I think) Since these patches came so close on the heels of the original source, it seems to me that they must have been available when the original source was posted. Why were they not applied before the source was posted? This is not a flame; these are questions that have baffled me for some time, and I would really like to know the reasons for doing things this way. Doug.