Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!gatech!mandrill!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!lvc From: lvc@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Lawrence V. Cipriani) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Trusting operating systems: vendor or university? Message-ID: <15084@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 5 Jun 88 11:48:24 GMT References: <1128@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <55239@sun.uucp> <1133@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <8013@brl-smoke.ARPA> Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer and Information Science Lines: 33 In article <8013@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB)) writes: >In article <1133@mcgill-vision.UUCP> mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) writes: >>They do? In my experience they generally ignore the bug reports. > >This is heavily vendor-dependent. For example, people at Gould would >see a remark on the "gouldbugs" mailing list, draw up the SPR on my >behalf, and send a timely response. That's hard to beat. > >>And my notion of fixing a bug involves getting >>a fix to the person with the problem within a week. Not "in the next >>major release - and oh yes, that will cost you $2500[1]". > >This is an entirely unrealistic notion. A description of software maintenance in large responsible organizations deleted. I'm glad you wrote your response Doug, I was going to try to say it too but you're a better writer. The scenario you describe is exactly the one I work in every day. Maybe AT&T is doing something right on the product I work on? I can't speak for any others. Off on a tangent ... I think maintenance is going to be the Achilles heel of GNU. Its hard enough to do maintenance without worrying about what modified code is running on the machine. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if GNU can survive the test of time, (how tautological!). And please, no lectures on GNU please, I've heard enough. -- Larry Cipriani, AT&T Network Systems and Ohio State University Domain: lvc@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Path: ...!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!lvc (strange but true)