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.