Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!usc!apple!vsi1!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: alt.sources.d Subject: Re: Perl patches (was Re: shar 3.49 (part 2 of 2)) Message-ID: <1990Sep21.020331.2225@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 21 Sep 90 02:03:31 GMT References: <1990Sep15.193958.10955@iwarp.intel.com> <1990Sep16.170917.11901@lokkur.dexter.mi.us> <727@array.UUCP> Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 23 I've seen a couple of newbie responses saying "no, perl wasn't released with that many patches"; these are folks looking at modern perl, not the initial release. As for why it was such a particular irritation to me, my host site was a school system, perennially short for space, so I'd download perl to my home system (tedious in the extreme on a slow modem), delete it from the host site, and Boom! -- another patch. Since no "patch" was available for my home system in those days, _upload_ perl, _patch_ perl, _download_ perl, _delete_ perl on the host, iterate 25 more times. Folks releasing things in dribbles don't realize the byzantine transport mechanisms and tool compromises some of their audience has to suffer to accomodate their habit, nor just how much inconvenience they cause by posting the source and the patch rather than the patched source. It looks like a couple minutes work to fix if you work in a monocomputer environment, but it may make several hours' work for some of your recipients. As a general rule, do as much work as possible where it can be done once, rather than send out the work undone to have its manhour consumption multiplied thousandfolds. Kent, the man from xanth.