Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!gatech!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!vsi!friedl From: friedl@vsi.UUCP (Stephen J. Friedl) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Trusting operating systems: vendor or university? Summary: Bug report responses from vendors Message-ID: <703@vsi.UUCP> Date: 5 Jun 88 18:37:16 GMT References: <1128@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <55239@sun.uucp> <1133@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <8013@brl-smoke.ARPA> Organization: V-Systems, Inc. -- Santa Ana, CA Lines: 32 In article <1133@mcgill-vision.UUCP> mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) writes: >They do? In my experience they generally ignore the bug reports. In article <8013@brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes: > 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. I would have to assume that (in general) vendors would appreciate getting technical feedback on their products. Many of us exercise software in ways the vendor is not likely, and our reports and workarounds should help improve their products. What vendors perhaps don't realize is that we would like feedback on our feedback. Let's face it, if we find a clever bug, we would like to get some information on it: was it really a bug? Have they heard it before? Any word on a fix? Did they get it? I have sent in pages and pages of detailed bug reports to several vendors (especially Microport and TeleVideo) and heard next to nothing back from them. A one-way feedback path gets old very quickly. Vendors might want to take a long-term view of this and be a little more verbose in their feedback to their strongly technical users who take the time to provide good reports. -- Steve Friedl V-Systems, Inc. (714) 545-6442 3B2-kind-of-guy friedl@vsi.com {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl attmail!vsi!friedl Nancy Reagan on ptr args with a prototype in scope: "Just say NULL"