Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ucsd!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.sys.pyramid Subject: Re: Gratuitous console msgs Message-ID: Date: 30 Aug 88 02:24:50 GMT References: <20@usl-pc.usl.edu> <3495@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> Distribution: na Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 21 Well, I asked the developers about the "rwip: bn < 0, error 69", and they said "this is a debugging message that we didn't mean to leave in the release. You should just comment it out." Obviously that requires source (which we have). So it's clearly a bug. I don't mind having RTOC say it isn't worth fixing. It's a minor problem, though it could be serious if it causes real error messages to be missed. But to say it isn't a bug is certainly wrong. I've also been annoyed by the messages saying that someone is going over quota. Again, this is not really intentional. The problem is that they've got this code that prints a message whenever a process goes over quota. Usually it gets put on the controlling terminal for the user to see. But if the process doesn't have a controlling terminal, the console gets it. You can't just suppress all such messages on the console, because somebody might be using the console for real work, and go over quota. So there was no easy way to know when to print it and when not to. One could argue that if there's no user to see it, you should make sure that you alert the operator. But that argument is bogus: Since the message doesn't tell you who is over quota, there's nothing the operator can do about it. This is just another thing that happened to work that way and isn't serious enough to bother fixing.