One of the, at best, annoying, and at worst down right difficult parts
of installing an arachne upgrade, is retaining those files, and parts
of files from the older version that you want to keep.
Typically, for instance, one must reinter the same data in arachne.cfg
for the new distribution.
In this regard, I wonder of some system of patches, at least for the
setup and configuration files, might make sense? Most ``modern'' software
control systems (e.g., CVS), and even archivers (e.g., arc) store past
versions or multiple versions as ``patches'' -- files that change what
part of a file has changed, and leave alone those lines or parts that
have not changed. This allows compact storage of a series of updates,
and retrieval of any particular update, if desired.
A simple well known program that does this, is the unix-like diff program,
along with the patch program (both ported to dos).
I wonder if arachne might distribute new distributions or updates, at
least for the setup or configuratins as patches? Then users need not
fear that the new distribution will wipe out their valuable settings and
data, unless they make backups. Some scheme, involving a setup wizard
could be used, for instance.
