Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!limes From: limes@ouroborous.wseng.sun.com (Greg Limes) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Trusting operating systems: vendor or university? Message-ID:Date: 6 Jun 88 05:02:03 GMT References: <1128@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <55239@sun.uucp> <1133@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <11812@mimsy.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.uucp Organization: Sun Microsystems Lines: 47 BEFORE launching into this, I would like to reiterate the standard disclaimer: I do not speak for Sun. Please bear this in mind. I speak for myself, and sometimes I may see things as I would like them to be, instead of as they really are. So what is new? For those of you who just tuned in: In article <1128@mcgill-vision.UUCP> der Mouse writes: >I trust [an os] written by a company out to make money even less. In article <55239@sun.uucp> limes@sun.uucp (Thats Me!) writes: >If the operating system does not work properly, the company gets >bug reports and has to fix them In article <1133@mcgill-vision.UUCP> mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) answers >They do? In my experience they generally ignore the bug reports. ... >my notion of fixing a bug involves getting a fix to the person with >the problem within a week. In article <11812@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes: >(or at least a `hm, yes, that is a bug/ no, that is a feature | here >is a workaround | we have no idea how to fix it yet but we are working >on it', not dead silence: we can get dead silence from Berkeley for >free :-) ) > >My own experience agrees with that of der Mouse, and applies to hardware >vendors as well as software (viz. Emulex). Bug reports never get any >answer, though the bugs do sometimes get fixed. Why should I pay for >this `service' when UCB CSRG operates more or less the same way? And in >their case the silence is excusable (CSRG can be described as `five guys >weilding source code', and there is no one left to answer bug reports). AND, in this article, I respond ... Folks, fixing bugs and getting the fixes out the door is not as trivial as some of you seem to think, and Sun is not as overstaffed as some others may think. My *entire* job consists of reading bug reports and trying to fix the problems described in them. I try to form an evaluation relatively quickly -- this is what Chris is asking about -- and it was my assumption that this evaluation was being forwarded to everyone who needed to know it, including the customer. As for sending a quick patch to the customer who called it in, see Doug Gwyn's article <8013@brl-smoke.ARPA>, and consider the meaning of the phrase "extreme emergency". -- Greg Limes [limes@sun.com]