File Release Notes and Changelog
Release Name: nh331-6.0
Notes: PatchHack is a single patch for NetHack version 3.3.1 that includes a large number of other "patches", each as a compile-time option. <p>As of version 6.0, there are over 50 different "patches" in PatchHack. Most of these are individual patches that were written separately; a few are collections of small related patches. <p>Why is PatchHack good? Well, there are two reasons, but both come down to one thing: convenience. By putting all these patches together, it makes it a lot easier to apply _all_ of them. Nobody would go through and apply 50 different patches separately (well, almost nobody), even if you could find them all. Secondly, many of the patches have been "enhanced" so that they will work together. For instance, there are three different patches that add new conducts to the game. Applying these patches separately is difficult because they all conflict with each other, and most of them won't work with the "dump character" patch. In PatchHack, these three patches will all work together happily either with or without the dump character patch. <p>Why is PatchHack bad? Well, it's nearly impossible to maintain. Fortunately (from the point of view of PatchHack, not NetHack players), most of the patches are not "works in progress"; they're written once and then left alone. Note that PatchHack does give the user who compiles the game the choice of what patches they want to use, so you can't say that it restricts your options! <p>A (hopefully) full list of these patches can be obtained from J. Ali Harlow's collection at http://avrc.city.ac.uk/nethack.html. The actual list of included patches is in include/config.h in the distribution. <p>The simplest way to install PatchHack is to download and apply the patch: <center>patch -s -p0 < patchhack-nh331-6.0.diff</center> within the vanilla NetHack source directory. Then edit config.h if desired, compile, and install as normal. <p>As always, the true NetHack source code can be found at http://www.nethack.org/.
Changes: Lots.
