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From: anders@verity.com (Anders Wallgren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: MPW Bugs and other complaints
Message-ID: <1991Jun21.233510.1859@verity.com>
Date: 21 Jun 91 23:35:10 GMT
References: <1991Jun20.182817.2292@techbook.com>
Sender: usenet@verity.com (USENET News)
Reply-To: anders@verity.com (Anders Wallgren)
Organization: Verity, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 46
In-Reply-To: larryh@techbook.com (Larry Hutchison)

In article <1991Jun20.182817.2292@techbook.com>, larryh@techbook (Larry Hutchison) writes:
>
>	Gee, I wish Apple would fix the bugs in their darn compilers.
>	Further, I wish they would not release "final" versions containing
>	known outstanding code generation bugs.  Even yet further, I wish
>	that COMPLETE bug lists were readily available.
>

As someone who has been using the MPW compilers for the last three
years (OK, so I'm not a _complete_ veteran, but nonetheless...), I
sympathize with you, but believe me, things are much better now than
they were before, both in terms of product quality and product
management's attitude towards the whole thing (at least they own the
source to the C compiler now - I understand that wasn't the case for
pre-3.0 - Gold Hills rings a bell).

I, for one, am grateful that the MPW team is speeding up their release
cycles a bit, both in terms of when final versions ship and when early
versions are available to those who want/need them.  ETO was a _great_
idea - laurels to whoever came up with the idea.

This quickening means that those who push the bleeding edges of the
mac development world get newer and better tools faster.  An
unfortunate side effect is that more bugs either slip through
unnoticed, or slip by because of time constraints.  As long as these
bugs aren't fatal for the majority, I don't see why they should keep
the rest of us from getting what we need.  I suppose the argument can
be made that you toss out another round of betas rather than go
production, but at some point you have to cut the process off and move
on, or you get stuck doing old things when you could be doing new
things, and new things are what Apple should be about.  It's a classic
trade-off and I think the MPW team is doing a pretty good job.

I also wish a complete bug list was available, but this is just one of
those catch-22 situations - if you release the complete list, your
product ends up looking shaky and people won't buy it, and if you
don't release the whole list, why bother at all?  To be honest, I
don't think people would be too upset to see the whole bug list for
MPW - it's a development environment geared for professional
developers and not MicroSoft Word, after all.  I've suggested this
many a time to people at Apple, but aside from the (way out of date)
Tools Bug Stack from an ETO or so ago, nothing's come of it.  I
suspect that assembling such a list isn't a trivial task, technically
or politically.

anders