Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!uunet!stanford.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!jik From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Re: v18i084: Zsh 2.00 - A small complaint Message-ID: Date: 28 Apr 91 05:33:15 GMT References: <1991Apr25.004233.22900@wolves.uucp> <1991Apr26.180756.5883@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 39 In-Reply-To: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG's message of 26 Apr 91 18:07:56 GMT Kent, there is an inherent difference between the problems that were found in your townmaze program after you posted it, and the problem with Zsh that Gregory Woodbury was pointing out. Your program was pretty much machine-independent. The bugs that you found were bugs on *any* system, not just on the ones that stumbled over it. Granted, the bugs didn't *turn up* on all systems on which you tested the program (else, as you pointed out, they would have turned up during your testing and would not have been in the version you released), but they were bugs nevertheless, and they might have turned up if you have used a debugging malloc or Saber-C or something like that. On the other hand, Zsh has in it code that is inherently non-portable, and that requires certain environments in order to compile it. Now, my suspicion is that anyone who is "sophisticated" (your word; I'm not sure it's the one I would have chosen, but it conveys what I'm trying to say in parallel with what you said) enough to write a shell, also knows enough to know when he's writing code that will only compile on certain types of system. If he doesn't, then I cannot fault him for not pointing out the OS dependencies, and I doubt anyone else would either. But I think it is reasonable to expect him to say, *in an introductory posting separate from the source code he's posting*, which environments he has compiled for. Furthermore, if he *knows* what OS dependencies there are, it is reasonable to expect him to point them out in that introductory posting. That's what Greg is asking for. You couldn't have known about the bugs in your code, so you couldn't have pointed them out. But the author of Zsh did know about the dependencies, so he could have pointed them out, and probably should have, in an introductory posting. Jonathan Kamens USnail: MIT Project Athena 11 Ashford Terrace jik@Athena.MIT.EDU Allston, MA 02134 Office: 617-253-8085 Home: 617-782-0710