Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!hwcs!neil
From: neil@cs.hw.ac.uk (Neil Forsyth)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Bugs in new BETA ROMS?
Message-ID: <1961@brahma.cs.hw.ac.uk>
Date: 8 Sep 88 08:07:49 GMT
References: <1947@brahma.cs.hw.ac.uk> <3525@druhi.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: neil@cs.hw.ac.uk (Neil Forsyth)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Computer Science, Heriot-Watt U., Scotland
Lines: 52

In article <3525@druhi.ATT.COM> dlm@druhi.ATT.COM (Dan Moore) writes:
>in article <1947@brahma.cs.hw.ac.uk>, neil@cs.hw.ac.uk (Neil Forsyth) says:
>> In article <3479@druhi.ATT.COM> med@druhi.ATT.COM (Myron Drapal) writes:
>>>to be tested and fixed (like PC compatible format... Oh, by the way, have
>>>any of the testers checked to see if the disk free function works properly
>>>yet - the old version reported number of free bytes off by at least
>>>2 clusters).
>> I have been sitting here listening with nothing to say for days then something
>> pops up that I actually know something about! Magic!
>> 
>> Atari (Allen|Roy|Ken) said yonks ago that they had found and killed the bug
>> that lost 2 clusters on a disk. But what if you put a the disk in a mchine with
>> old ROMs? It can't read the last two clusters! So, sadly, the bug stays.
>
>
>	Are you sure that the old ROMs can't read the last two clusters
>on the disk? ... (article trimmed) ..
>formatting disks on both my PC and my ST and comparing them.  My
>conclusion was that GemDos was quite happy to read a disk using the last
>two clusters.  It also could delete files that used those clusters.  It
>just couldn't write to them and also didn't include them in the disk
>free space calculation.

OK TOS 1.0x can read the 2 clusters but I would say that not being able to
write to the clusters was a good enough reason not to fix the bug.
ie. "Hey I just changed one word in this file I'm editing but I can't save it 
back to disk! What's happening" - "Oh your still using the old ROMs. Sorry"
(usually followed by "my ROMs better than yours, it's got ..." :-)

I still think that all bugs should be fixed and backward compatible patch be
ditributed. Maybe it's too late for 1.4 but what about 1.5

>
>					Dan Moore
>					AT&T Bell Labs
>					Denver
>					dlm@druhi.ATT.COM

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! Neil Forsyth                           JANET:  neil@uk.ac.hw.cs             !
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