Re: Patches to Pan 0.132 for Fedora 9/GCC 4.3.0

Duncan <[email protected]> posted
[email protected], excerpted below, on  Wed, 03 Sep 2008
22:07:55 +0000:

> Jeremy Bennett <jeremy.bennett-8TGePjlpftxWk0Htik3J/[email protected]>
> posted 1220453101.2871.116.camel@thomas, excerpted below, on  Wed, 03
> Sep 2008 15:45:01 +0100:
> 
>> GCC 4.3.0 is pickier than older compilers about which headers are
>> included. I've patched the source of Pan 0.132 to add the missing
>> headers.
> 
> This is old news here.  There's patches for this in 0.133 already, along
> with the *.nzb buffer overflow security issue, and for newer glib
> compatibility, among other things.

Um... After posting that I realized it no doubt comes across to others as 
it does to me on second reading... rather more harshly than intended.

Therefore, I apologize.

It may be old news here, but you obviously didn't know that, or that 
0.133 was already patched for gcc 4.3, or you'd have not gone to the 
trouble of creating a patch against 0.132.  I'm not personally a coder 
altho I can read code well enough to do trivial patches on occasion.  
None-the-less, it's far easier to rely on others to post the patches and 
to help test them =:^) than to create them myself, and I really am 
grateful to those who do post them.

So thanks... even if someone else did get there sometime ahead of you.  
It is to folks that post such patches that I am indebted, given that I'm 
running a full gcc-4.3 compiled system today.

That said, as I suggested in the previous post, it really does save work 
to check both the current version (upstream, not just on your 
distribution) and the upstream bug database, before doing the work 
yourself.  If it's a patch to make something work against a newer version 
of <whatever>, unless you are getting to it within days or weeks after 
release of that newer version, chances are really good you won't have to 
do the work yourself, as someone else has already done it. =;^)

Meanwhile, all that time you save by checking to see if it's already 
done, you can put into developing patches for so-far missing 
functionality, such as, say, posting attachments, or my favorite not-yet-
implemented-feature, scoring on headers such as NNTP-Posting-Host that 
aren't in the overviews. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman