chip@ateng.ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) (05/17/89)
According to bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells): >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! In the specific case of Elm 2.2, it's worth noting that the posted patches to Elm 2.2 have all been minor. Note the "Priority" field of the patch headers, which have all been "low" or "medium". Elm 2.2 was thoroughly tested. Most sites installed it with no local hacks. That's *no* local hacks. Seldom is a Usenet source posting so clean. The moral is that raw patch counts are not significant. It's the nature of the patches that counts. In the case of B News 2.11, the patches result in code which seems to consist mostly of nested #ifdefs. Elm isn't like that. Disclaimer: I'm part of the Elm development group, and I like our work. -- Chip Salzenberg <chip@ateng.com> or <uunet!ateng!chip> A T Engineering Me? Speak for my company? Surely you jest! "It's no good. They're tapping the lines."