Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!pacbell!ames!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!cernvax!pan!jw
From: jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: IBM bug notification/update policy
Message-ID: <550@pan.UUCP>
Date: 7 Aug 89 06:35:02 GMT
Reply-To: jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson)
Organization: Adasoft AG, Solothurn, Switzerland
Lines: 45


I recently posted a complaint about aixterm not working correctly with
R3 window managers.  I got a response by mail from someone at IBM which
said that there had been an update last January which fixed this.  This
was at least the second time that I have posted something to this news
group, and then been told that the problem had already been fixed.

Due to the IBM's absolutely IDIOTIC policy of not notifying customers
of bugs or available fixes, I had no way of knowing that there was a
solution to this problem (or any other AIX problem).

For those who are not familiar with this piece of trash that IBM calls
corporate policy, it goes like this.  When a customer calls and reports
a problem, the customer support engineer checks a database of previously
reported problems.  If the same, or very similar, problem has already
been reported and fixed, you hit the jackpot!  The grand prize is an
update diskette which (maybe) fixes your problem.  This policy leads
to a situation where customers constantly feel they are missing out on
updates, so they start calling IBM support and playing "20 questions".
The customer says "I have a C compiler problem"; the support person
says "What kind of problem"; the customer says "I'm not sure; what kind
of bug fixes have you got for the C compiler".  Then they go on down
the list.  Great fun.

Unfortunately, the people who work in IBM customer support are not the
most knowledgeable Unix experts in the world, so it is frequently
difficult to get them to understand exactly what you are reporting and
how to duplicate it.  As a case in point, I tried to report some uucp
problems not long ago.  I found that the support engineer I was talking
to had never even *heard* of uucp; so I had to try to explain how to set
up and use uucp before I could even start on the bug report.  Not exactly
a good time...

Then, just to top things off, the people working in Austin who are
supposed to support the customer service engineers have recently
discovered a new response to virtually any bug report - "That's not a
bug, it's a documentation error."  For example, I recently discovered
a bug in the C complier; the %c conversion in scanf skips white space.
After several weeks of discussion and debate, the answer came back from
IBM Austin that this was a "documentation error".  It was only after we
showed them that the C compilers on DOS and OS/2 didn't have this bug
that they broke down and admitted that it was a bug, and said that they
would fix it.  I'm still waiting for the fix...

jw