Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!lll-tis!ames!pacbell!david
From: david@pacbell.PacBell.COM (David St.Pierre)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Elm, the newsgroup from hell
Keywords: flames from below
Message-ID: <343@pacbell.PacBell.COM>
Date: 17 May 88 17:07:02 GMT
References: <1022@bellboy.UUCP> <2998@s.cc.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: david@pacbell.PacBell.COM (David St.Pierre)
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA
Lines: 36

In article <2998@s.cc.purdue.edu> rsk@s.cc.purdue.edu.UUCP (Wombat) writes:
>
>I don't claim to speak for Dave, but it's not Dave's job to run this
>newsgroup, support Elm for the entire world, or anything like that; I
>suspect that he gets paid to do other sorts of work, and that his
>priorities are thus focused elsewhere.  

I agree, but feel that Dave did Elm a pretty major disservice a few
months ago by saying that *he* had 2.0 and then not talking about it
anymore. Now people wonder whether they should look for 1.7, wait for
2.0, or ???

I thought 1.7 was supposed to come out of comp.sources.{unix, misc} several 
months ago. I thought I read somewhere that it was "sent back" for more
testing. But at the same time, people like myself and others have picked
up the software from one source or another. I even mailed a tape to
Switzerland just because of all these unending discussions about 1.7 with
no official source posting.

I also doubt that I'm not alone in having added fixes/features/misfeatures
to 1.7 since picking it up. I'd like to use this newsgroup to post some of
the changes to it (I'd done the arrow key stuff a long time ago and also
made left-arrow and right-arrow page backwards and forwards on the index
page) but suspect that would only result in another round of people asking
for 1.7 so they could start applying patches.

I also suspect that there are so many mutants of 1.7 beta that applying
patches is going to be a real b*t%h, you know what I mean? Face it, 
nobody really wants to apply diffs by hand any more.

We could probably cut down on a lot of circular discussions if we just
posted the sources to 1.7beta in this newsgroup, a bit at a time and
then started sending fixes into a single point or just start posting them.


-- 
David St. Pierre 415/823-6800 {att,bellcore,sun,ames,pyramid}!pacbell!david