Re: inadequate/inconsisten 'help pkg' message; problems with downloading

[John W. Eaton]

On  6-Aug-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

| 2011/8/6 Sergei Steshenko <address@hidden>:
| 
| > If/when I'm done, I'll post the _whole_ 'pkg.m' - it easier for humans
| > to comprehend files opposed to file deltas, and a patch.
| >
| 
| I don't know about other humans, but as for myself and probably other
| Octave developers, reading diffs is quite easy and natural. I can also
| easily import them into Emacs and get various diff visualisations from
| it. I can generate my own diff if you prefer to post all of your
| changes, but they're a little complicated to extract from your emails.

We want diffs because we will almost never simply replace an existing
function or file with a completely new version because if we do that,
then we could lose changes that have been made to our development
sources that are not present in the version you started with.  Context
diffs can usually be applied even if our version has some other
changes.  And if a diff fails to apply, then we know that there are
overlapping changes that we need to carefully examine.  So if you send
us a completely new file, we'll just ask you to produce a set of
context diffs relative to the version you started with.  If you are
incapable of doing that, then we'll probably ask you to tell us the
version you started with, or send us the original file that you
started with before you made changes so we can generate our own diffs
to examine.

jwe