[Pan-users] Re: Better processing of very large groups?

[Duncan]

"Travis" <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, 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