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From: jg@jumbo.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Bugs in uwm/menuwm for SUNs
Message-ID: <767@jumbo.dec.com>
Date: Sat, 28-Mar-87 03:53:32 EST
Article-I.D.: jumbo.767
Posted: Sat Mar 28 03:53:32 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 29-Mar-87 08:44:55 EST
References: <5794@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: jg@jumbo.UUCP (Jim Gettys)
Organization: DEC Systems Research Center
Lines: 29

The fact is that software is best tested on the machines on which one
works day by day.  And the situation is that those machines allow that
class of bug to go undetected.  At Project Athena, we were restricted to
IBM and DEC hardware, and to get any access to a Sun I had to go to a
different group and beg machine access.  (Athena is NOT in Tech Square).
Worrying about how well things ran on a Sun is almost completely
irrelevant to the aims of that project; Athena has its hands full just
getting things to work well on DEC and IBM hardware.  Bob Scheifler's
group at the time in Tech Square is also Vax based;  the few Suns there
were in machine rooms and typically nearly unused, not being the personal
platform of any of the people.  X has now outgrown its origins, and some
re-examination of how things should be handled is now in order.

In a commercial company, the competitor's hardware is very hard to come
by, since it costs real money rather than the internal transfer cost.
Such machines in any company tend to be orphans, not properly set up or
maintained, and not used on a day to day basis for real work.  Most often,
they are used intermittantly to get an idea what the competition is up to.
The net result is that things do not get the workout they deserve.

One of the problems we are now facing is how to do a better job on V11
than could be done given the situation at MIT during V10 development; I
believe it would be a good idea for the companies involved to be able to
set up machines in one place on one network for testing.  The logistical
questions of how and where to set such a situation up are challenging, and
it would be valuable for this to be discussed in this news group, or
alternatively, in the private alpha-tester's mailing list.

				Jim Gettys