On Wed, 7 Sep 2011, Always Learning wrote: > On Wed, 2011-09-07 at 15:03 +0100, John Hodrien wrote: > >> On Wed, 7 Sep 2011, Always Learning wrote: >>> >>> Perhaps a silly question, but why maintain patches ? Why not compile a >>> new version and discard all the patches ? Patches are a messy manner to >>> maintain programmes. > >> That's fine if you just want to jump ship to a new version. But what if the >> new version breaks some things, or changes behaviour in a way you don't want, >> or removes a feature. > > If one compiled a 'new' version containing all those many existing > patches, would not that 'new' version simply work exactly as the old > version patched by countless alternations ? If that's all you're doing, there's no pain in having the patches. But what happens if you don't want *all* the patches? jh