Xref: utzoo comp.sources.d:6169 comp.sources.bugs:2731 Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!apple!vsi1!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d,comp.sources.bugs Subject: problems patching trn Keywords: "mthread*" not found Message-ID: <1990Dec17.070057.29084@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 17 Dec 90 07:00:57 GMT Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 34 When I unpacked the trn distribution with the two reposted parts, and tried to use the incredibly nonstandard patch procedure and patch1 included with it, the patch died looking for a file whose name started "mthread"; there was indeed no such file in the distribution, (at least as it unpacked for me), yet a grep through the posted articles showed it mentioned too many places to filter through and find out what was wrong. I finally pitched the trn distribution en masse, rather than have it continue to tie up a couple megabytes of disk. Does anyone have a clue to offer as to what's going on here? [N.B.: 1) I don't care how much space it saves, don't post patches as anything but context diffs; cutesy, non-standard methods are not the way to share software across a net full of people who like life as simple as possible; you just confuse and irritate your audience, in my case to the point that "rm -rf ./trn" got the archive unpacking directory. 2) I found nothing in the enclosed documentation to indicate that patch1, in a format I'd never seen, was to be applied by compiling and executing the unipatch.c code and passing the result ot patch, until after I'd resorted to email to ask a friend for help. Don't assume that the shar headers are read by your audience; I never look at them after the first article, the second and subsequent articles just get piped through unshar blindly; instructions hidden in the shar header get nuked by unshar and are never seen except by accident. If you have something to say, put it into a README file that gets unpacked and seen by ls, don't hide it in the shar header, which is not saved and often not seen. ] Kent, the man from xanth.