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From: dce@mips.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Sun and 4.3 csh (was lpd problems)
Message-ID: <234@quacky.mips.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 27-Mar-87 10:42:45 EST
Article-I.D.: quacky.234
Posted: Fri Mar 27 10:42:45 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Mar-87 15:05:32 EST
References: <5483@brl-adm.ARPA> <4914@garnet.Diamond.BBN.COM> <185@teddy.ursa.UUCP>
Reply-To: dce@quacky.UUCP (David Elliott)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 44

In article <185@teddy.ursa.UUCP> sdo@teddy.UUCP (Scott Oaks) writes:
>The only way to find out about the change was to do a man csh after the
>upgrade.  This is a little unreasonable -- obviously no one is going to 
>read 8 sections of UNIX manuals to find out if things are upward compatable.
>If Sun had made a section in the release notes about programs which are not
>iupward compataible, everyone would have made the change initially, and this
>discussion would have been avoided.  Instead, a lot of things failed for
>a lot of people who had to put in a lot of extra hours to track down what
>is essentially a minor change.

While I'm not defending Sun in this particular case, I am very sensitive
to the issue of release notes and people reading them.

Recent events have shown me that people that are "Unix-literate" will
actually tend to not read release notes as carefully as beginners.

Also, there are cases in which people do not pass the release notes
on to all of their users.

People tend to think "Unix is Unix". There are users that can't believe
that our system would be different from 4.3BSD or System V.3, even
though we call them by different names and point out that we supply an
"enhanced" system, just as there are AT&T marketing folks that will
try to create named pipes on a BSD-based system no matter how much you
say "BSD doesn't have named pipes!".

In our system release notes, we try to list everything that changed in
the system, even those things that didn't change functionally, so that
a customer will have a quick reference. We also try to provide automatic
system file conversion (such as for the NFS version of /etc/fstab and
the 4.2-4.3 change in /etc/ttys) so that the users don't have to worry
about them.

Even the best release notes and conversion tools don't help the poor
system administrator that has inherited a whole slew of shell scripts
(mostly written by people that never intended them to be used by
anyone else) that start breaking just because they used a "feature"
that wasn't explicitly documented.

What can be done to really make getting new releases painless?
-- 
			David Elliott

UUCP: 	{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!decwrl!mips!dce, DDD:  	408-720-1700