Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!hoptoad!gnu From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix Subject: Re: LaTeX for Xenix (posting sources here is a no-no) Message-ID: <10306@hoptoad.uucp> Date: 19 Feb 90 05:24:09 GMT References: <1990Feb15.233047.1867@metro.ucc.su.oz.au> Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco Lines: 51 glenn@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (G Geers) wrote: > Well here it is. The next 14 postings contain the source... I am all in favor of posting source code, but how about posting it to the right newsgroup? This is a discussion group, not a source group. Why does that make a difference, you ask. I'm glad you asked. . . A lot of people like to archive all the sources that come through their system -- they might need them later, and the articles only stick around a week or two. If you post to a discussion group, most of these folks will not notice your sources, and they will get discarded rather than archived. A lot of other people are running on small budgets (either of money, modem speed, or disk space) and are not able to get high volume newsgroups. If people start dumping sources into a discussion group, the volume goes way up (each of those 14 messages was 45K -- the rest of the postings in comp.unix.xenix on my system are 1-4k except one 9K one). This fills people's disks or gives them a surprise when the phone bill arrives. Then they have to stop receiving the group, even though they want to participate in the discussion. If you haven't checked out the sources groups, try it some time. The best one is comp.sources.unix, which has the highest quality material, though it's sometimes slow to get something published there. The other groups for Unix stuff are comp.sources.misc and alt.sources. (Yes, Xenix stuff belongs in Unix newsgroups; Xenix is Unix, or close enough.) Everything that gets sent to these sources groups is archived at dozens of places around the net, so you can easily get it later. Check the group "comp.archives" for details. One other note. When you port a program to Xenix, often the best thing to do is to send back your changes to the original author (or the current maintainer -- e.g. the guy who posted it). If your changes are clean, and the author isn't swamped with other stuff, the next "official" version will already run on Xenix and you (and everybody else) won't have to port it again. Oops, I guess it's two notes. If a program is widely available (like TeX or anything posted to comp.sources.*) then if you really want to post something, just post your patches to a sources group, then post a short message to comp.unix.xenix telling people where the patches are. The "patch" program is another widely available program, and everybody who does any serious work on programs from the net will have or get a copy. If your variant of Xenix doesn't have "diff -c", which generates "context diffs" (the best kind of patches), you can also get free programs that will generate them, including GNU Diff and "cdiff". See comp.archives on how to get these. -- John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com Just say *yes* to drugs. If someone offers you a drug war, just say no.