Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!hsdndev!husc6!unix!unix.sri.com!dowding From: dowding@ai.sri.com (John Dowding) Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog Subject: Re: Arity's so-called upgrade Message-ID: Date: 18 Mar 91 18:03:48 GMT References: <11768@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu> <4989@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> Sender: news@unix.SRI.COM Organization: SRI International, Menlo Park, CA Lines: 48 In-reply-to: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au's message of 18 Mar 91 08:15:23 GMT In article <4989@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: In article , dowding@ai.sri.com (John Dowding) writes: > Who knows how many times I have spent hours tracking down bugs in > products that the vendor already knew was there? How many times did you *ask* whether they already knew about the mistake? From my own experience, SUN *did* tell you whether your problem was a known one (after you submitted it), provided the person submitting the report was the official contact person for the site. I think that you are missing the point here, Richard. It doesn't save me any time time to find out that the vendor already knew about a bug after I have traced through it enough to submit a bug report. By the way, my understanding of a "support contract" is that information like this "feature such and such has mistake so and so, we intend to fix it soon/in the next release/eventually, in the mean time here is how to work around it" is one of the things that such a contract is FOR. Of course I am not suggesting that the net replace the role of support contracts, but a support contract is only useful when you have already determined that the problem that you are having is a bug in the product (as opposed to a bug in your code), and you have distilled it to the point of submitting a minimal example in a bug report. > In any case, it is certainly not the vendors[sci]place to tell us what > should and should not be discussed on the net. I'm not a vendor. And the point of my posting was not to say "thou shalt not" but to say "DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR, go FIRST to the people who really DO have the answers, as opposed to the people who only think they have the answers." Yes, the point of your posting was not to say "thou shalt not", but I was not replying to your posting, but to the gentleman representing Arity who said that this newsgroup was an inappropriate forum for discussing complaints about their products. Also, I disagree with your assertion that it is the vendors that really do have the answers. In many cases I believe that it is the users of the product who really understand what the limitations are. Very often, the implementors of a product will not actually use it to get any work done. John Dowding dowding@ai.sri.com