Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site utcs.uucp Path: utzoo!utcs!geoff From: geoff@utcs.uucp (Geoff Collyer) Newsgroups: net.news.group,net.news Subject: why people don't upgrade to the newest and bluest B news Message-ID: <955@utcs.uucp> Date: Fri, 8-Nov-85 03:14:23 EST Article-I.D.: utcs.955 Posted: Fri Nov 8 03:14:23 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 8-Nov-85 04:37:29 EST References: <202@bambi.UUCP> <677@decuac.UUCP> Reply-To: geoff@utcs.uucp (Geoff Collyer) Organization: University of Toronto - General Purpose UNIX Lines: 55 Xref: utcs net.news.group:4159 net.news:3859 Summary: cuz the damn stuff doesn't include posted bug fixes In article <677@decuac.UUCP> avolio@decuac.UUCP (Frederick M. Avolio) writes: > People are running versions of >news that are 3 years old and 3 versions old. (For example, by the >header I see that site bambi runs news 2.10.1 created on 6/24/83. >2.10.2 has been around for over a year now.) Software changes for >enforcement of rules will never work since there is no way to make >people install them. (People don't, even when there are free and >better versions available!) Sorry for the long inclusion, but these complaints are often heard from news gurus. Erik Fair recently said similar things. utcs and utcsstat are still running 2.10.1 and are likely to either keep running it, run Australian 2.10.1 news (by Michael Rourke) or run our own. [ We already run rn and Henry Spencer's expire, which doesn't have all the bells and gongs of the standard expire but runs *much* faster (it keeps the expiry time in the history file so it never has to open, stat or even access a file to determine whether to expire it or not) and regenerates the dbm history data base each time it runs. If Henry or I gets around to rewriting inews (or modifying Australian inews) so that it does its own unbatching without forking nor execing, I'd be glad to chuck B news into the trash. ] Let me tell you why I don't plan to upgrade our machines. I would be much more interested in running new versions of B news if I didn't have to regression test all the new sources against my sources to ensure that fixes that were posted to Usenet and mailed to the maintainers were *actually* incorporated into the latest version. We started out running 2.3 and upgraded pretty religously until 2.10.1. Around 2.8 or 2.9 I found a number of bugs, mailed & posted them and they weren't fixed in 2.10, so I mailed them to Mark Horton again and they weren't fixed in 2.10.1 (the ones that spring to mind are a bunch of unchecked fopens that can fail if your machine doesn't have a /usr/tmp, for example). Given that the news sources are big, I have no interest in regression testing new releases, and there really haven't been major improvements in news since 2.10.1 to act as a carrot. I keep hearing that 2.10.2 and the as-yet-unavailable 2.10.3 are vastly better written than previous versions of B news, but I don't have the energy to diff my current (much debugged) sources with new ones to verify that my fixes really got in. If a sufficiently large carrot (in the form of some vast new improvement) appears in a new news version, I might gather up the energy to diff versions, but if my fixes are *still* not in the new version I look at, I doubt very much that I'll ever do it again. Australian news is attractive because it is much better written that B news 2.10.1, changes infrequently (I know of only two versions: 1.0 and 1.1) and its source code is about 1/7th the size of the B news sources, so there is far less code to diff or fix. Incidentally, utzoo (a backbone site) is still running B news 2.10, except for Henry's completely new expire, even though backbones are supposed to run the latest and greatest B news code. I can fully understand why Henry hasn't upgraded. -- B news is Bad news.