Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!inco!alembic!csu
From: csu@alembic.ACS.COM (Dave Mack)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: When is C News being released?
Message-ID: <3515@alembic.ACS.COM>
Date: 12 May 89 04:58:09 GMT
References: <24133@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1989May9.191034.3424@utzoo.uucp> <918@twwells.uucp>
Reply-To: csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack)
Organization: Alembic Computer Services, McLean, VA
Lines: 39
UUCP-Path: uunet!inco!alembic!csu

In article <918@twwells.uucp> bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
>Followups have been directed to comp.sources.d.
>
>In article <1989May9.191034.3424@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>: Personally, I do not consider a steady stream of revised releases to be
>: a good sign... :-)
>
>Hooray!
>
>I've become really disgusted with the amount of patching that goes
>into some of the posted software. I would much rather wait for a
>tested release than be the unintentional beta tester that many people
>have become.
>
>E.g., I would have brought up elm to replace mailx but there was
>patch 1, patch 2, ..., patch 7! All in the space of a few weeks. It
>might have been the case that elm would have worked fine for me but
>this was *not* encouraging!
>
>Please folks, if you have to release something that you don't *know*
>is reasonably tested, note it as a beta. And tell us what *has* been
>tested.

This is an unrealistic point of view. It is pretty much impossible
for a developer to test every aspect of even a medium-sized system
on all the different machines with all the ever-so-slightly-different
operating systems that you find on the net.

In the case of Elm 2.2, it was usable as it was distributed. The
patches have been either to accomodate the peculiarities of a 
particular machine or operating system, or to fix relatively minor
bugs in obscure and little-used parts of the system.

I agree that there should be a minimal level of debugged functionality
in a package when it gets distributed, but you picked a remarkably
bad example to make your point with.

-- 
Dave Mack