Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!orc!inews!iwarp.intel.com!gargoyle!chinet!saj
From: saj@chinet.chi.il.us (Stephen Jacobs)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st.tech
Subject: Re: Mark Williams db under TOS 1.4?
Summary: Sometimes the good fortune of a friend can hurt
Keywords: Mark Williams compilers Coherent
Message-ID: <1990Oct03.141140.16215@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 3 Oct 90 14:11:40 GMT
References: <1990Sep15.045313.12574@chinet.chi.il.us> <16960003@hpldola.HP.COM>
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 29

In article <16960003@hpldola.HP.COM> jg@hpldola.HP.COM (Joe Gilray) writes:
>
>Steve,
>
>Here is some information from my archives:
>
>NOTE that the last reference is from YOU! (pretty scary huh?)
>
>In article <1990Jun13.205444.19303@chinet.chi.il.us>, saj@chinet.chi.il.us (Stephen Jacobs) writes:
>> I had occasion to speak to the ST support guy at Mark Williams recently.  One
>> thing I asked him about was making db (their binary-level debugger) work with
>> TOS 1.4.  He recommended against trying, for example using the binary patches

Ok, here's what changed.  Mark Williams Company has a MAJOR hit in their 
COHERENT operating system for PC compatibles.  It gives people a chance to
try something VERY UNIX-like for a reasonable price.  As a result, the resources
they were going to devote to fixing db properly will not be available (that
means that the guy who would have had to do the work has been drafted for
an upgrade to COHERENT).  3WThey also inform me that Atari has been less
than cooperative about helping them with the fix for new TOS versions.  A
debugger really DOES have to do things that most developers are better off not
even suspecting are possible.  When the wait was maybe a few months for a 
proper fix, that was tolerable (to me; maybe not to you).  Now the word is
probably never.

I'm trying to be happy for a group who put out a product I like very much, and
who still are happy to go out of their way to help when I have problems with
it (as long as I telephone for help rather than writing).
                                     Steve J.