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Re:In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released by breput on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @09:37PM (#23840255)
The confusion might be around the term "patch". These can be sometimes be simple diff patches. Or they can be multi-step processes, including reboots, all wrapped up into a single "patch".

For example: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/Patch...

I recently updated from patch level 462 to 469 (the most recently patch available) and even with excellent documentation, it was an involved process. If you look all the way back to the first set of patches (https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/Patch...) there isn't even documentation for the most part. Some diffs, some random tar files, and some "Remove everything above the #! /bin/sh line." patches.

Re:In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released by progman32 on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @09:42PM (#23840287)
Ah. I understand the difficulty now, thanks. Some patches might not even apply in reverse!
Re:In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released by bsdimp on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @10:08PM (#23840427)
It's hard to reverse apply 'rm /usr/src/bin/ld.c' in the instructions to patch 160, for example. You have to reconstruct ld.c from 2.10.1BSD, and then add missing changes to get it to work...
Re:In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released by qubex on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:36AM (#23841720)
Exactly: deletions is what came to my mind instantly and if you hadn’t raised the issue then I would have.