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From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Off BASIS
Message-ID: <9008271938.AA00576@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 27 Aug 90 19:12:26 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 24

> As regards GNU EMACS, If one person/department at SUN made it known that
> he would keep the most recent version of GNU EMACS available (by FTP, at
> least, or by keeping a disk copy that could be borrowed, copied, and
> returned), then there would be no reason for multiple versions of EMACS
> to proliferate.

There is such a person and such a "most recent version, readily available",
but the company is so big and is growing so fast that people routinely
FTP GNU EMACS from God-knows-where without bothering to ask where the
the "official version" is.  Also, lots of people just like to hack on it.

I'm not saying that electronic distribution doesn't have its advantages,
I'm just saying that it inevitably leads to multiple versions and some
amount of confusion.

All in all, I am in favor of electronic distribution, with a reasonable
attempt to keep some amount of control.  I would like to see an ASCII
version myself.  However, the people who are doing the actual work of
editing and distributing it have chosen not to distribute it that way.

Since I haven't volunteered to do the work, I don't feel empowered to
dictate to them how to do it.

Mitch