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From: amir@booboo.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Who sells PC/VI?:  Now MKS Toolkit
Message-ID: <396@booboo.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 11-Jun-87 17:59:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: booboo.396
Posted: Thu Jun 11 17:59:35 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Jun-87 09:33:10 EDT
References: <42900004@uicsrd| <413@qiclab.UUCP| <2168@tekgvs.TEK.COM| <271@mks.UUCP>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Gould CSD, Fort Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 82

In article <271@mks.UUCP>, alex@mks.UUCP writes:
> We have never distributed a release 2.0 toolkit.  If you have a set of
> documentation out there saying 2.0 or a set of floppies saying 2.0 I would
> be mightily surprised and some royal screwup occured.
> 
My error!  I checked my doc and to my surprise it is 2.1d!  How could it
be that other people have the same version but theirs works?  Don't you
not change the revision number when you add fixes?  If not, why did your
posting mention "that some earlier versions had bugs"?  (2.1d was the
first version that ksh).

> Don't complain about phoning Canada.  Its no more expensive than anywhere
> calls in the US.  More importantly, we do accept collect calls and have
> never refused one.

I guess you don't work for a company that has a switchboard.  To make that
collect call, I have to call our operator to get me the AT&T operator
and then I have tell them to make the call for me.  Not exactly the same
as picking up the phone and dialing an 800 number.

> We have sent as of yesterday notice of release 2.2 to all registered users
> of the toolkit. 
I just got your 2.2 notice (two weeks after this discussion started).  It
costs $45 to get an update to something that never worked to begin with
(ksh).  I refuse to pay it!

> Do you honestly expect us to notify all such people on
> EVERY bug?  The toolkit 2.1 contains something like 70 different executables,
> 2.2 has over 80.  Virtually nobody out there uses all of them.

Not every bug.  Only the ones that make the program usable!  Every program
in the package works resonably well (and some of them better than original
Unix versions).  I would still be happy if you never updated them.  My
only problem is with ksh that kept crashing my machine and the one
illusive bug in vi which causes "divide by 0" traps.  

> We get people who buy and just use awk.  Or just Vi.  Or just the shell.
> Or just grep and diff and sed.
> I would suspect that only 10-20% of users actually use the shell.

Well, I use vi/sh/ls/grep/diff the most.  If you look at the frequency of
commands used on Unix systems (in program development), these will rank
much higher than awk and sed.

In all honestly, I am sure that there are people that use awk.  I simply
got the impression that you were spending all of your resources 
*enhancing* awk when you had a shell that was full of bugs.  Don't you
not consider bug fixes more important than enhancements (after all the
awk program worked)?

> Our policy on bugs is that if you find one, call our technical support
> and we'll send you *free* a fixed version.  Look at the policy of some
> other companies - I was looking at Phoenix's the other day - it told me
> the FIRST person to find and report a given bug would get a free update.
> I.e. Future people finding it would have to pay an extra $50 to get the
> upgrade.

Did Phoenix document their policy?  You sure didn't.  Where in the manual
did you mention anything about the free fixed versions?  If you did,
where is mine?  When I reported the bug with vi, I was told I had to
wait for the next update to get it.  No mention of simply fixing the
problem and sending it on a floppy.  I was sent the next update (2.1d) but
that was three months later.  I had to fix my filesystem with chkdsk
every night due to that bug.  Had I known your policy I would have
demanded a fix right then.

As I have mentioned in all of my postings, your package is really one
of the best out there.  The number of utilities supplied are really
beyond what one would consider possible on MSDOS.  Why you let a few
major bugs in your ksh and vi ruin the image of the product is byond me.

I do appologize to the net for boring everyone with *my* problems.  If 
nobody else is having problems, then they must have improved the quality of
their software.  This will be my last posting on the subject.  My
mail address is listed below for anyone intrested in discussing the
matter further.  Thank you for your patience (souds like the wine cooler
commercials!).

-- 
Amir H. Majidimehr
Gould Inc, Computer Systems Division
{sun,pur-ee,brl-bmd}!gould!amir