frank@morgan.com (Frank Wortner) (06/24/88)
Well, it looks like I goofed again! I apologize to everyone who tried to use the patch I distributed only to discover it did not work. A number of people made reported that patch did nothing. I.e, patch fred fred.patch just sits there or does not change fred at all. I've seen this problem before. Look in the file common.h. The type LINENUM should be long, *not* int. I made the mistake of distributing it with LINENUM defined to be int; change it to long and life should be better. A warning -- compiling patch will produce a lot of error messages (all warnings) from the Minix C compiler. Ignore the messages -- the program *should* work. (It does for me.) I've heard of cases of patch not compiling at all. Unfortunately, I can't determine why, since I have had no real problems in that regard. Finally, Andy Tanenbaum has managed to contact Larry Wall (the author of patch), so if all goes well, perhaps the latest version will contain "official" Minix support :-). Once again, I'm sorry that my posting was inaccurate. This fix should cure the problem. (By the way, the READ-ME-FIRST mentioned this problem, but in a different context.) I'm also sorry I took so long to respond to this problem, but I've been away for the past two weeks. My wife thought it was a bad idea to take a computer terminal on our honeymoon. ;-) Frank