Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!apple!oliveb!amdahl!pacbell!pbhyf!rob
From: rob@PacBell.COM (Rob Bernardo)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: elm 2.2 PL20 sysalias unofficial patch
Keywords: elm 2.2 PL10 sysalias unofficial patch
Message-ID: <5980@pbhyf.PacBell.COM>
Date: 3 Sep 89 01:03:10 GMT
References: <870@wubios.wustl.edu> <27062@amdcad.AMD.COM> <193@titania.warwick.ac.uk>
Reply-To: rob@PacBell.COM (Rob Bernardo)
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA
Lines: 23

In article <193@titania.warwick.ac.uk> cudcv@warwick.ac.uk (Rob McMahon) writes:
+In article <27062@amdcad.AMD.COM> indra@hobbes.AMD.COM (Indra Singhal) writes:
+>I am not sure how everyone else feels, but posting unofficial patches on the
+>net is a sure way of causing confusion.
+
+I strongly disagree with this.  It is clear which are official patches and
+which are unofficial, if you don't want to apply unofficial patches, there's
+no need to.  The `patch' program makes it easy to uninstall a patch when an
+official fix comes round (provided you keep the original patch around of
+course), or there's no problem if you use RCS or s.t. to keep things under
+control.

There's a problem with unofficial patches and support of ELM. If an unofficial
patch breaks something unrelated to the issue it addresses (quite easy to
do -- I know from experience :-) ), this can cause a headache when the
resulting bug is reported to the ELM development team, esp. if reported
by a user who is unaware that the ELM they are using contains an unofficial
patch.
-- 
Rob Bernardo      ...![backbone]!pacbell!pbhyf!rob -or- rob@pbhyf.PacBell.COM
  Product engineer, UNIX/C Reusable Code Library        Editor, "Go `C' UNIX"
  Office: (415) 823-2417                Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, California
  Residence: (415) 827-4301                     R BAR JB, Concord, California