Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!voa3!ck
From: ck@voa3.VOA.GOV (Chris Kern)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: (C News) limit filesize and inews
Message-ID: <1991Jan6.141235.21838@voa3.VOA.GOV>
Date: 6 Jan 91 14:12:35 GMT
References: <1991Jan6.004313.8792@zoo.toronto.edu> <3463@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> <1991Jan6.073729.21354@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: Voice of America, Washington, D.C.
Lines: 32

In article <1991Jan6.073729.21354@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu
(Henry Spencer) writes:

>[Sometimes a well-known bug in a popular manufacturer's port of UNIX]
>                                is just plain wrong, and I refuse to
>spend hours mangling dozens of shell files to avoid provoking it.  I
>will document the problem -- and a look at C News's notebook/problems
>will reveal that these are real examples, by the way -- but that's all.

We have a couple of aging systems whose bugs, misfeatures, and various
idiosyncratic extensions often require us to make changes to publicly
distributed source code that compiles cleanly almost everywhere else.
I recently brought up C News on one of them.  It was a surprisingly
pleasant experience.  I did run up against one nasty bug in the vendor's
Bourne shell, but it was clearly documented in the "problems" file that
Henry mentions, along with several suggestions for working around it.

Of course, we all know that in the real world there will be vendors who
won't commit the resources to fix significant bugs on a responsible
schedule.  I agree that it is not desirable to "contort" a public
software distribution to accommodate those flaws.  Such changes tend to
reduce comprehensibility and add overhead; if the vendor finally gets the
message, they may even wind up outliving the bug they were intended to
correct.  However, it is very helpful when developers who release major
software packages to the net include the kind of documentation about
known problems that is provided in the C News distribution.

(It is also helpful when the documentation is as lucid as that included
with C News, but that's another issue. . . . )

-- 
Chris Kern     ck@voa3.voa.gov     ...uunet!voa3!ck     +1 202-619-2020