world management and patches

[Scott McKay <SWM@sapsucker.scrc.symbolics.com>]

    Date: Tue, 21 Jun 88 11:40 EDT
    From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)

	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.

"This policy" has been changed.  Note that quick, over-the-phone patches
are "out of band" w.r.t. ECOs, although the intent is to track all such
patches so that they can be considered for inclusion into the ECO
stream.