Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!evan
From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Patch release frequency (was Re: When is C News being released?)
Message-ID: <1989May12.154952.3818@telly.on.ca>
Date: 12 May 89 15:49:52 GMT
References: <24133@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1989May9.191034.3424@utzoo.uucp> <918@twwells.uucp> <3515@alembic.ACS.COM>
Organization: The Open Vapourware Foundation (join now!)
Lines: 58

In article <918@twwells.uucp> bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:

>>I've become really disgusted with the amount of patching that goes
>>into some of the posted software. I would much rather wait for a
>>tested release than be the unintentional beta tester that many people
>>have become.

>>E.g., I would have brought up elm to replace mailx but there was
>>patch 1, patch 2, ..., patch 7! All in the space of a few weeks. It
>>might have been the case that elm would have worked fine for me but
>>this was *not* encouraging!

To which csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) replies:

>This is an unrealistic point of view. It is pretty much impossible
>for a developer to test every aspect of even a medium-sized system
>on all the different machines with all the ever-so-slightly-different
>operating systems that you find on the net.

>In the case of Elm 2.2, it was usable as it was distributed. The
>patches have been either to accomodate the peculiarities of a 
>particular machine or operating system, or to fix relatively minor
>bugs in obscure and little-used parts of the system.

>I agree that there should be a minimal level of debugged functionality
>in a package when it gets distributed, but you picked a remarkably
>bad example to make your point with.

I don't think so.

To me, the issue is not whether patches are necessary, but the frequency
with which they're issued. Most of the elm patches were marked medium to
low priority. Why could they not be lumped together in a single patch,
rather than a few little ones? Why could one not set milestones, say every
quarter, at which time all non-crucial fixes done since the last patch
are sent out as a single patch?

Of course, patches which fix fatal errors get sent right away. But that
was not the case with elm.

Instead, we have bunches of "I missed patch N - who has it?" postings,
and patches posted to the bugs group, rather than the sources group,
so that some automatic archiving sites miss them. If the patches were
non-critical, why could they not have survived waiting in line in the
sources group?

Look, this isn't meant as a knock on those who have given the community
such a wonderful program. But for a volunteer effort, I suggest that
it is *less* work to send out fewer patches at regular intervals, than
to send out each fix as soon as it's written. Fewer revision levels,
fewer pre-requisite files to keep track of, easier for both the
developer and the end-user to maintain.

-- 

Evan Leibovitch, SA, Telly Online, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
   evan@telly.on.ca / {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
Scientists have proven conclusively: Research causes cancer in lab animals