Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!phri!roy From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news Subject: Bugs in NeWs documentation Message-ID: <3426@phri.UUCP> Date: 8 Aug 88 14:20:26 GMT Organization: Public Health Research Institute, NYC, NY Lines: 76 As a followup to my recent flamage about the NeWS documentation I want to point out two specific mistakes, one just ugly and embarrassing, the other horribly confusing and inexcusable. Both give you the distinct impression that they were really rushing to push the docs out the door and didn't have the time to do it right. 1) On page 215 of the "NeWS 1.1 Manual" (the CPS man page), the description of the -i option reads, "... For example, and would be defined in the second file." This isn't so bad; once you've puzzled over it for a minute, it becomes obvious that some text is missing and it's easy enough to go to the man page source file and see what happened. It looks like somebody ran the man pages off with the wrong macro package. Not fatal, but not something I'd be proud to ship to a customer. 2) On page 47 of the "NeWS Application Scenario", the cps source code is listed for go4.cps. IT'S WRONG! The end of the definition for draw_board reads "... } for stroke } def" in the manual, but if you go to the actual file Sun supplies (/usr/NeWS/clientsrc/app_guide/go/go4.cps, you see: /draw_board { % - => - (draw the playing surface) board_color setcolor clippath fill line_color setcolor 0 1 BOARD_MAX { dup 0 moveto 0 BOARD_MAX rlineto 0 exch moveto BOARD_MAX 0 rlineto } for stroke pause } def Note the "pause" stuck in after the "stroke"! For someone struggling to figure out how this all works by building an application based on the examples given, crap like this can really ruin your day (I'm still trying to figure out which version of the code is the correct one). Isn't the sample code in the manual imported directly from the working source files? If yes, then how could a line of code be left out? If no, then why not? Hey folks (you NeWS people at Sun are reading this, aren't you?), I'm sorry if I sound so pissed, but this whole NeWS deal is really making my opinion of Sun take a nosedive. I know I only paid $100 for the package, but that's not the point. Before we ordered NeWS, I had a longish talk with my salescritter about it. The talk went something like this: Me: Sure, NeWS sounds like the way to go (and the way of the future) but I'm not interested in playing with a beta test release. Critter: No, no, no, this isn't beta test. Me: But I keep hearing about all these various bugs people keep finding and stuff like that. I'd just as soon wait for the real thing. Critter: This is the real thing; what we're shipping now is a production-quality system, with all the wrinkles ironed out, and it's N (for some random value of N which I can't remember now) times faster than the 1.0 release. Sorry Sun, but this just doesn't cut it. The idea is neat, perhaps even wonderful. But the implementation is slow, buggy, and incomplete (running dbxtool, for example, under news does work, but it's hardly what I'd call convenient). The documentation is just as bad; confusing, incomplete, and in some case, just plain WRONG. The pity of it all is that all you needed to do to get a happy customer (me) was to tell me all this when I bought it. If my salescritter had just said told me "yes, it's a lot better than 1.0, but it's not really production quality yet; that'll be version 1.2" at least I would have known what I was getting into. Maybe I wouldn't have bothered, but if I didn't, I certainly would have bought the next release, and presumably been happy with it because it would have worked. -- Roy Smith, System Administrator Public Health Research Institute {allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net "The connector is the network"