world management and patches

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Mon, 20 Jun 88 15:42 PDT
    From: Jerry@marlowe.inference.dialnet.symbolics.com (Jerry Bakin)

    A useful addition to the patch commands in Zmacs would be a command to
    package patch sources and the new patch-dir into a mail message and
    another command to unpack this message and create the appropriate files
    in the patch directory.

    I've been thinking about this for a month or so, but haven't had the
    time.  (Yeah, but of course we've had the time to manually package these
    things up, mail them, and unpack them about three or four dozen times now!)

    Jerry.

Symbolics is way ahead of you on this one:  Genera 7.2 ECO Tape
#1includes support for receiving future ECOs (which are just patches) by
electronic mail.  The new M-X Decode ECO Zmail command will read a
message and write a file, and this file can then be read using "Restore
Distribution :Use Disk <pathname>" (the Decode ECO command will offer to
run this automatically).

Note that I don't believe that having this facility will completely
solve the problem I originally sent mail about.  The patch facility will
not load patch #N unless patch #N-1 has already been loaded.  But
sometimes Symbolics has sent me individual patches without sending me
all the patches that preceded it.  Maybe now that they have a reasonable
mechanism for distributing ECOs they will change this policy.

                                                barmar