NON-SOURCE POSTINGS CONSIDERED HARMFUL!

[Tom Christiansen]

>From the keyboard of src at scuzzy.in-berlin.de (Heiko Blume):
:tchrist at convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
:
:>Oh well.  I thought that it needed being said, and in public so that folks
:>who didn't know better and might sometime go off and post non-source would
:>learn that this wasn't the best idea.
:
:sigh, what is "source code" ?! i got a somewhat flamy mail
:in reply to my bash patches indicating that i should only
:post source to alt.sources, and that a.s.d is for comments
:and requests... i suspect that it's a prepared file that
:the person (didn't bother to save the mail) sends to anyone
:who, in his opinion, hasn't posted "source".

I'm sure glad it wasn't me.  

:so let's discuss: are patches to a generally available program "source code" ?

I asked myself the same question when posting a recent patch.  There
exists an 'alt.sources.patches', but it doesn't seem to get used very
much.  In the comp hierarchy, we have a comp.sources.bugs, which does see
a fair amount of traffic.  IMHO, it's ok to post patches to alt.sources,
since they are themselves source.  Perhaps the thought police will explain
wherein I err in opining thus.

I still think that alt.sources is a sufficiently useful group as to merit
promotion into the comp hierarchy to promote a wider distribution.

--tom
--
"Hey, did you hear Stallman has replaced /vmunix with /vmunix.el?  Now
 he can finally have the whole O/S built-in to his editor like he
 always wanted!" --me (Tom Christiansen <tchrist at convex.com>)