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From: sob@tmc.edu (Stan Barber)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: (C News) limit filesize and inews
Message-ID: <3463@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu>
Date: 6 Jan 91 06:39:17 GMT
References: <1991Jan4.202944.7348@zoo.toronto.edu> <3461@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> <1991Jan6.004313.8792@zoo.toronto.edu>
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In article <1991Jan6.004313.8792@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>Bear in mind that we don't get paid for this.  That being the case, the
>time we have to spend on it is quite small.  Our to-do lists are full to
>overflowing with ideas that would benefit much larger numbers of users
>and would be less of a pain to implement.
I think we both have this problem. However, my approach has always been to
cope with bugs in systems I have access to. I can't test on systems I don't
have. If it won't work on a OS I can test on, I should fix it. When I have
failed in this, I have regretted it.
>>To take the ivory tower attitude that the end-user should get the OS fixed
>>it commendable, but not always reasonable.
>It is both reasonable and necessary in certain cases, unless you have
>unlimited time to spend and don't care about the impact on future maintenance.
I think that's what I said. However, if you post code that should be widely
usable and it doesn't run on the most popular varients of Unix available, then
I have to question if that is due to the inability to get on a system to test
the code or the "ivory tower attitude" that the varient is broken and the 
providers of the varient should fix their code in order that your code should
work.




-- 
Stan           internet: sob@bcm.tmc.edu         Director, Networking 
Olan           uucp: {rutgers,mailrus}!bcm!sob   and Systems Support
Barber         Opinions expressed are only mine. Baylor College of Medicine