diff|patch

[Vadim Antonov avg@postman.ncube.com]

From: Scott Schwartz <schwartz@galapagos.cse.psu.edu>

>I don't get it.

You're not alone.

>As far as I can tell, context diffs and patch are not
>a matter of unix compatability, creeping features, religious wars, or
>anything like that.  It's just a fact that without patch applying these
>updates is intolerably arduous, and without context diffs you have to
>manually examine the files, split them into sections for patch, and
>copy new files into place, and suffer a greater likelihood of error.
>Why do it the hard way, when simple, effective, minimalistic, software
>tools are available to do the job?

diff with context is undoubtly convinient.  As for the patches,
may i propose that all patches be published in format like that:

	ed - /sys/src/cmd/mycmd.c << '/&'
	.... output of diff -e
	/&

and applied only to the CD-ROM code (i.e. no patches on patches).

(For you computer history buffs -- /& was the terminating card in datasets
in DOS/360.  OS/370 and later used '//'.  //GO.SYSIN DD * was used
as indicator of a beginning of the dataset following this card, for
step GO (program run). '*' means that the data is inlined, the end
of data was indicated by any card containting // in first two columns.
So, the bundle's usage of the sacred JCL is revisionist :)

--vadim