Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: When is C News being released?
Message-ID: <934@twwells.uucp>
Date: 18 May 89 20:53:38 GMT
References: <24133@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1989May9.191034.3424@utzoo.uucp> <918@twwells.uucp> <3515@alembic.ACS.COM>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
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In article <3515@alembic.ACS.COM> csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) writes:
: >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.

Oh, really? I do it all the time. There are ways to get this right
the first time, ignoring, of course, the inevitable bugs that will
creep into any distribution. If there is one word that describes the
necessary, it is "localize": anything which could be remotely system
dependent gets put in one place.

Most code that doesn't quite work on varying machines, in spite of
effort to make it portable, seems to have the defect of having system
dependencies scattered throughout the code.

: 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.

This is what I'm told. However, not being an Elm guru, I have no way
to evaluate the significance of the patches short of spending time I
don't have. Thus I said that the patches were "not encouraging". I
didn't say, because I didn't know, that there was something wrong with
Elm. If I knew, I wouldn't have been discouraged! :-)

---
Bill                            { uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill