Perl patches (was Re: shar 3.49 (part 2 of 2))

[Kent Paul Dolan]

I've seen a couple of newbie responses saying "no, perl wasn't released
with that many patches"; these are folks looking at modern perl, not the
initial release.

As for why it was such a particular irritation to me, my host site was
a school system, perennially short for space, so I'd download perl to
my home system (tedious in the extreme on a slow modem), delete it from
the host site, and Boom! -- another patch.  Since no "patch" was available
for my home system in those days, _upload_ perl, _patch_ perl, _download_
perl, _delete_ perl on the host, iterate 25 more times.

Folks releasing things in dribbles don't realize the byzantine transport
mechanisms and tool compromises some of their audience has to suffer
to accomodate their habit, nor just how much inconvenience they cause by
posting the source and the patch rather than the patched source.  It looks
like a couple minutes work to fix if you work in a monocomputer environment,
but it may make several hours' work for some of your recipients.  As a
general rule, do as much work as possible where it can be done once,
rather than send out the work undone to have its manhour consumption
multiplied thousandfolds.

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian at Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian at well.sf.ca.us>