Lots of heat, little light. (was: Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes)

[J.T. Conklin]

In article <1990Jul11.072612.10374 at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
|>[...] my next release of the ACS will be in the form of shar files. As an 
|>added bonus, all of the filenames will be under 14 characters in this
|>one.
|
|As a newbie to one of the systems that causes this concern, I note that
|this isn't good enough.  If you want to be able to issue patch files
|that work with "patch", you have to hold the file names down to 9 or fewer
|characters so that the ".orig" extensions patch creates are respected,
|rather than lost, making the original have the same name as, and therefore
|clobber/be clobbered by the patched version.

If you get the most up to date version of patch, it only appends a ~
or # to the filenames on systems with 14 char filesystems.  Therefore,
13 char filenames should be sufficient.

	--jtc

-- 
J.T. Conklin	UniFax Communications Inc.
		...!{uunet,ubc-cs}!van-bc!jtc, jtc at wimsey.bc.ca