problems patching trn

[Kent Paul Dolan]

When I unpacked the trn distribution with the two reposted parts, and
tried to use the incredibly nonstandard patch procedure and patch1
included with it, the patch died looking for a file whose name started
"mthread"; there was indeed no such file in the distribution, (at least
as it unpacked for me), yet a grep through the posted articles showed it
mentioned too many places to filter through and find out what was wrong.

I finally pitched the trn distribution en masse, rather than have it
continue to tie up a couple megabytes of disk.  Does anyone have a clue
to offer as to what's going on here?

[N.B.:

1) I don't care how much space it saves, don't post patches as anything
but context diffs; cutesy, non-standard methods are not the way to share
software across a net full of people who like life as simple as
possible; you just confuse and irritate your audience, in my case to the
point that "rm -rf ./trn" got the archive unpacking directory.

2) I found nothing in the enclosed documentation to indicate that
patch1, in a format I'd never seen, was to be applied by compiling and
executing the unipatch.c code and passing the result ot patch, until
after I'd resorted to email to ask a friend for help. Don't assume that
the shar headers are read by your audience; I never look at them after
the first article, the second and subsequent articles just get piped
through unshar blindly; instructions hidden in the shar header get nuked
by unshar and are never seen except by accident. If you have something
to say, put it into a README file that gets unpacked and seen by ls,
don't hide it in the shar header, which is not saved and often not seen.

]

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian at Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian at well.sf.ca.us>