Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!claris!krazy From: krazy@claris.com (Jeff Erickson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: GS/OS bugginess? Message-ID: <9011@claris.com> Date: 7 Mar 89 01:02:24 GMT References: <8903060413.aa11956@SMOKE.BRL.MIL> Organization: Claris Corporation, Mountain View CA Lines: 86 From article <8903060413.aa11956@SMOKE.BRL.MIL>, by AWCTTYPA@UIAMVS.BITNET ("David A. Lyons"): >>> This seems obvious, but I do _not_ recommend you test your >>> _under-development_ applications under GS/OS with a hard drive turned >>> on, unless the volume is expendable. >>That's great, but my application has to run under GS/OS. This means >>I have to test it under GS/OS. > I didn't say not to test it with GS/OS. I said not with a > non-expendable hard drive! If you don't want to boot GS/OS off of > 3.5 drives, surely your employer can afford extra HDs for testing > purposes, so you can keep your important ones offline during testing. Wait. "During testing"? Perhaps we disagree on methodology here. I fix a bug. I run it on my system immediately to see if it works. I don't generally have TIME to turn of my hard drive just to see if my fix worked. I considered switching back to P16 on my source drive the first time it died. The speed gains outweighed the time it takes to re-initialize and restore my hard drive. (Daily backups are your friend...) > When you set the cache size to 0, there is still a 16K cache inside. > You can't turn it off completely. So I have since been told by wombat@claris. >>Now I know. But if it's so trivial, why don't the tools do it for >>you, like the Mac tools do. Sure, the application CAN eject the disk >>itself, but I don't know of any that DO. > > That's news to me--I always assumed that applications on the Mac > were responsible for asking the system to eject disks. If not, how > does/should it work? Should GS/OS eject a disk, chosen at random?, > whenever it would report "volume not found"? How can it know > whether the disk you're about to insert is a 3.5, a 5.25, a CD-ROM > disk, etc, given only the disk's name? No. I think the rule when the Mac OS wants a disk is it ejects the least recently used one. Okay, you got me here. I keep forgetting about those damn 5 1/4" floppies. Your point. > I object to the implication that there's nothing more behind the GS > toolbox design than wanting to be the Mac's little brother. Things > like the SF Eject button aren't strictly necessary for the GS, so > there is a difference in the way Standard File looks. (That's not > the only difference.) But there are things the GS has done better > than the Mac, too--like window scroll bars that show you how much > of the content you're seeing, and TaskMaster. I wasn't implying that. I was implying that if Apple does eventually want Apple II users to move over to the Mac (likely), they ought to make the interfaces consistent. I agree that there are some things the GS does much better interface-wise. The Mac should adopt them. > ...if System 4.0 is as buggy as you make it sound, I'd much rather > hear _specific_ bug reports. I haven't had many problems. Three bugs come to mind immediately: 1. If a scaled font gets purged, and you request the same font again, you get garbage. 2. If you call DrawPicture when there is not enough memory to duplicate the picture, the tool dies rather than returning a memory error. This situation commonly occurs while printing. 3. If you call ChooseFont, and there is a non-empty update region in the frontmost window, it tries to update it by calling the update routine stored in the window record. If you aren't using TaskMaster, there's usually a zero there, and ChooseFont doesn't check. It just dies. All of these bugs have been reported to Apple II DTS, and confirmed. > That sounds like a reasonable _partial_ response to me. They can't > fix it _retroactively_...you have to work around it until the next > system disk release. I have a lot of trouble imagining them saying > "Yeah, it's a bug, and we like it. We're keeping it." These bugs would probably have been found before release if Apple hadn't pushed so hard to get GS/OS released. Fortunately, last I heard, they are fixing them. > --David A. Lyons -- Jeff Erickson \ Internet: krazy@claris.com AppleLink: Erickson4 Claris Corporation \ UUCP: {ames,apple,portal,sun,voder}!claris!krazy 415/960-2693 \________________________________________________________ ____________________/ "I'm so heppy I'm mizzabil!"