Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ncar!gatech!bloom-beacon!ZERMATT.LCS.MIT.EDU!RWS
From: RWS@ZERMATT.LCS.MIT.EDU (Robert Scheifler)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: list of bug fixes
Message-ID: <19880630181506.9.RWS@KILLINGTON.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: 30 Jun 88 18:15:00 GMT
References: <8103@elsie.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 23


    Date: 30 Jun 88 13:27:23 GMT
    From: elsie!ado@cvl.umd.edu  (Arthur David Olson)

    Here I've been sending off bug reports willy-nilly to 
    xbugs@expo.lcs.mit.edu, only to learn now that the correct behavior is to
    "wait until the next release" before reporting noncritical bugs.

I can't quite tell if you are confused or just being snide, and your
comments may have confused others, so I'll take a chance and respond.
We aren't suggesting you postpone reporting of bugs.  We hope you will
report bugs of all sorts as you find them.  However, our experience has
been that disseminating bug reports too widely is a big mistake, because
"the public" tends to believe everything they read and will apply
suggested "fixes" that tend to break more than they fix.  I suspect the
majority of people on this list don't really want to see the volume of
bug mail we receive; xpert has a low enough signal to noise ratio
already.

If you don't like the fact that we don't immediately post any and all
fixes we make, sorry.  I think you'll find that is true of most
organizations trying to maintain large software distributions.  It is
canonical that no matter how you provide as a free service, somebody
will complain that it isn't enough.