Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Inline assembler; a quiz (long; sorry) Message-ID: <8296@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Mon, 13-Jul-87 15:06:13 EDT Article-I.D.: utzoo.8296 Posted: Mon Jul 13 15:06:13 1987 Date-Received: Mon, 13-Jul-87 15:06:13 EDT References: <608@zen.UUCP> <2299@hoptoad.uucp> <21211@sun.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 31 > > In fact, if they are clients of a certain solar workstation manufacturer, > > they don't even have documentation (/usr/doc, that is). > > Big deal. You get documentation, you just don't get the "troff" > source to it. How many vendors *do* supply that stuff? Well, I recall one that did. No support, no bug fixes, no help, no advice, don't-call-us-we'll-call-you... but they did ship sources. Funny, their system became awfully popular for some reason... (For those who haven't figured it out, I'm talking about AT&T and the original Unix distributions.) Shipping the printed copies only is just dandy if the user wants to run your software absolutely straight out of the box. Oddly enough, many don't, and as a result they end up writing their own documentation from scratch. Not that Sun's documentation is any great shakes, in fact it stinks, but it might be a useful starting point for some people. > (Besides, > getting it wouldn't do you any good; we use our own macro packages > and other tools, and it would be too much trouble to supply and > support them.) Funny, I seem to recall IBM using an explanation along those lines when asked why they didn't supply sources in a high-level language. "Well, we've got all this great stuff, but we can't be bothered letting the peons, oops I mean the customers, have it." Is this really the model Sun wants to emulate? -- Mars must wait -- we have un- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology finished business on the Moon. {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry