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From: woodsb@helios.ecn.purdue.edu (Brent L. Woods)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.misc
Subject: Re: The Jargon File -- an apologia
Summary: Did you think about the size of the diffs?
Message-ID: <1991Mar26.080558.26266@noose.ecn.purdue.edu>
Date: 26 Mar 91 08:05:58 GMT
References: <19116@rpp386.cactus.org> <1ZtF0O#754Tp97th6rb6mgr9j5k5BVG=eric@snark.thyrsus.com> <19119@rpp386.cactus.org>
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In article <19119@rpp386.cactus.org> jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F Haugh II)
writes:
 >
 >To contrast your behavior against source postings, it would be like
 >posting the entire source to Elm or Perl every other week when posting
 >context diffs would be more efficient.  What do the maintainers of Elm
 >and Perl do?  They post diffs.  What does Eric do?  He re-posts the
 >entire object.

     He's frequently justified.  I can remember one case where Mr.
Raymond *explicitly* stated that the diffs were larger than the file
itself.  Tell me, in that case, which would you have him post?  I've
kept copies of most of the versions of the Jargon file (all the ones
since 2.1.5, in fact), and there have been enough difference between
the major revisions (the second digit) that I easily believe that the
diffs were close to the file in size.

     Either diffs or the whole file, I really doubt that it would have
made much difference.  Everyone keeps prattling on and on about posting
diffs instead of the file, but no one has ever mentioned the possible
size of the diffs.


--
     Brent Woods

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