My Mercury snippet has only been on the developer.circlemud.org
site for a few days now, and I've already received several emails
congratulating me on the following statement:
-from Mercury.README-
"I did not release this as a patch for many reasons. First, I hate
them.
Second, I hate them. And third, they really, really suck.
Seriously, I have found it much easier to install snippets than to
hand-patch huge pieces of code, especially when it is hard to tell
where the code goes, since you can't see the working file the patch
was based on."
-End snip-
What I would like to do now is to beg the coding community as a whole
to comment on this. I would really like to hear everyone's feelings
on the subject. Email me directly if you feel you need to flame me
personally.
I agree that patches are much easier to create, and they lessen the
chances of making a mistake, but I feel that if you are going to
release code to the general public, you should keep in mind that this
contribution could be around for several years, meaning that circlemud
itself will probably be updated, affecting contribution in untold ways.
My feelings:
Patches are lazy and inconsiderate.
I could flame individuals, whose patches I have personally been unable
to implement due to being very old and impossible to hand-patch, but
that would not be in my nature. I feel that every contribution is very
important, however I feel that snippets are more valuable to the
average
coder than patches, especially as circlemud developes in the future.
-FIRE
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. All in one Place.
http://shopping.yahoo.com/
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Ensure that you have read the CircleMUD Mailing List FAQ: |
| http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 04/11/01 PDT