Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ulowell!hawk!boneill
From: boneill@hawk.ulowell.edu (SoftXc Coordinator)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: When is C News being released?
Message-ID: <13259@swan.ulowell.edu>
Date: 12 May 89 17:30:08 GMT
References: <24133@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1989May9.191034.3424@utzoo.uucp> <918@twwells.uucp>
Sender: news@swan.ulowell.edu
Reply-To: boneill@hawk.ulowell.edu (SoftXc Coordinator)
Organization: University of Lowell, CS Dept.
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In article <918@twwells.uucp> bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
>Followups have been directed to comp.sources.d.
>
>In article <1989May9.191034.3424@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>: Personally, I do not consider a steady stream of revised releases to be
>: a good sign... :-)
>
>Hooray!
>
>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!
>

As one of the Elm Develoment group, I think I should point out that most of
those patches were to fix quirks on systems for which it had not been tested
on. To my knowledge, none of the patches were of high priority. In fact, the
very first was to fix a problem with the documentation that came about in
it's original posting. Elm WAS tested, by many people on many systems.
Unfortunately, the trouble in making it fully portable is that there are too
many systems to take care of. There is always somebody who has some system
running some OS that doesn't like Elm. Inevitably, some patches follow for a
short time.

I believe the same problems will happen when 2.3 is developed, tested, and
released. 

==============================================================================
Brian O'Neill, MS-DOS Software Exchange Coordinator
ArpaNet: boneill@hawk.ulowell.edu 
UUCP: {(backbones),harvard,mit-eddie,et. al.}!ulowell!hawk.ulowell.edu!boneill