Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!elroy!devvax!lwall From: lwall@devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Re: PATCH usage Message-ID: <2359@devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> Date: 30 Jun 88 20:06:01 GMT References: <393@sce.UUCP> <1129@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> Reply-To: lwall@devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. Lines: 54 In article <393@sce.UUCP> graham@sce.UUCP (Doug Graham) writes: > 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? In article <1129@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson) writes: : : I cannot answer for Larry, but for my free IBM-PC editor, Freemacs, it : is *much* easier to have one distribution with patches than several : distributions. I keep a copy of all my distributions and patches : forever, so I have an incentive to keep the number of distributions : low. I do make multiple distributions, but I don't generally send them off to comp.sources.unix or I'd flood the net. Those who ftp kits from me will find subdirectories like ~ftp/pub/patch.2.0/kits@12, where the @12 indicates that the kits in that directory are at patchlevel 12. : The comp.sources.unix programs often sit queued up for a while, and : during that time, perl && patch && virt are available for anonymous : ftp. Therefore, by the time Usenet sees a program, there have already : been a number of "real" users finding bugs. I suspect that Larry : keeps the moderator updated with patches, and he bundles them up when : he posts the program. This is the primary reason you saw 25 quick patches for perl. When I send things off to Rich they are almost always at patchlevel 0. It also happens that newer things evolve faster. It is a measure of perl 2.0's stability that it's been three weeks since I sent it to Rich and there's only one published patch (so far). Rich had 10 of those 25 patches at the time he posted perl 1.0. (I think I was up to about 14 when the first kit came in here) And he did include those 10 as an extra message. It's true that it would take less overall bandwidth to repost the kits, but it's never true at any point in time that the next patch is longer than the distribution. Or rather, it's only been true once, and that is why you got perl 2.0 patchlevel 0 instead of perl 1.0 patchlevel 30. That 30th patch would have been about 3 times bigger than a new distribution. About 10 times bigger if I'd sent out a new patch every time I made a change. Sometimes you just have to break sync and start fresh. The danger, of course, is that you might never get back in sync. I went off to my hermitage to come up with a new rn over a year and a half ago, and I still don't have a runnable version, let alone a distributable one. It's just sittin' around in pieces on the floor. The news 3.0 people want me to integrate it with them, and I can't even integrate it with 2.11 yet. One has only so much spare time, sigh... Larry Wall lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov