"Travis" <travis.shorel...@gmail.com> posted b70405489165462e93c107e362bc1...@travispc, excerpted below, on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:50:40 -0700:
> I also saw that the folk that provide the Windows version of Pan said > he/she/they were going to add it, sometime. > > So I take it the patch can't just be applied to Pan? Yes, that's what I I thought I said, apply it to pan, probably with a few more patches as well. Where /else/ would a pan patch be applied? To the kernel? To the GTK or other libraries pan uses? Hardly. But of course, then that patched pan source has to be recompiled, and it's probably just a matter of getting the properly rounded tuit <g>, for them to get all the patches together, apply them, then recompile the binary, upload it to their server so folks can download it, and then make the announcement. All that takes time, and since the folks doing it are volunteers that work that into their schedule around whatever else they do in real life, as I said, it's a question of getting the properly rounded tuit (getting around to it). Unless you actually meant patching the binary, which as Ron says, basically isn't done in the freedomware world. And it wouldn't help here, either, because that'd be an additional step, taking a binary diff of the post-patched post-recompiled program binary against the original one. But the process to get that compiled binary to binary diff against the original one is still the same, and once it's actually compiled, why not simply put the new version up and tell people about it? So as Ron says, binary diffs simply aren't done very often in the freedomware world (with occasional exceptions for particular distributions, who may distribute binary diffs for mostly security updates of specific versions of current packages for currently supported distribution releases), as there's simply too many possible binary versions out there to diff against, including the possibility that users have compiled their own versions, which won't match the binary diffs anyway. So it's just not all that practical. The proprietaryware world is of course rather different, since there's generally only a very limited few bit-unique binary versions out there, often only one for a particular product version, and it's thus much simpler to provide binary patches for them. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
