Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!nova.cc.purdue.edu!gerrit
From: gerrit@nova.cc.purdue.edu (Gerrit)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Bugs and Problems
Message-ID: <8297@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 12 Mar 90 03:41:07 GMT
References: <9887@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Sender: news@mentor.cc.purdue.edu
Reply-To: gerrit@nova.cc.purdue.edu (Gerrit)
Organization: Purdue University
Lines: 111

In article <9887@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> rogerj@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Roger Jagoda) asks about a lot of bugs/differences:

Re: /private/tmp/k_load* files, 20K to 5MB?

These are part of the loadable device drivers; see kern_loader for some
more info.  There should only be one file for loadable device driver type
if I understand correctly and I was under the impression that they are
fixed size - actually about 128K for the standard device type.

>-- What are the ".places" files that are everywhere? Erasing them seems
>to make no difference...does having them there?

They are a "cache" for the browser.  Every time you pass through a
directory the browser attempts to update the file.  You could probably
(although I haven't tried this) run a find every night to dink them if
space is a problem.

Re: black hole vs. trash-can semantics

This is as much a matter of philosophy as anything.  It would be better if
the files in the black hole would "time out" after a while.  Or, you could
set up a find(1) out of cron(8) to dink files in user's .NeXT/.NeXTTrash
directories at regular intervals to get a similar semantic.  I personally
dislike associating logout with "really remove files."  They are really two
seperate concepts that the Mac has overloaded.  Of course, some Mac user's
no longer realize that this is an overloaded function and expect the Mac's
funtionality.  If it is a problem, I'd suggest the cron/find solution.

Re: problems with npd

I have seen two major classes of printing problems with the NeXT.  One is
usually from trying to use a non-NeXT cable to attach the printer to the
cube.  The timing/distance combination is very important for transfers at
that rate of speed.  That will often cause incorrect status matchups and
a sick npd.  Related to that is running the cable around a fridge or other
noisy electrical source.  The other major class of problems is related to
bad PostScript code.  Npd often chokes if you feed it imperfect PostScript.
Mathematica may indeed be a source of this type of problem.  This is
hopefully something that NeXT is working on.

>-- There is a MAJOR bug in the mach_swapon routine. With the 40MB

There is a bug in the implementation of Mach 1.? or NeXT's version of Mach
that is related to swapping on two different devices.  This should be fixed
in 2.0 (both NeXT's 2.0 and Mach 2.0 if I remember all my numbers
correctly).  I'm not sure why your swap drives are failing so regularly; we
only have about 8-10 with swap drives and none have failed as yet that I'm
aware of.  They've only been installed for a little over a month, though.

>Mach is known to have some of the best memory managment internals of any
>system...what happened here!?

Mach may have one of the best theoretical memory management designs
and a fairly good implementation, but Mach is also a fairly young
OS and some of these swapping ideas are fairly new (swapping to
multiple FILES as opposed to partitions, specifying high water/low
water marks, file preferences, and NFS all in the same swapping
package) and there are bound to be a few bugs that aren't found
until the code is actually used by people in real life.  This is
one of those.  As a plug for Mach/NeXT's port/implementation - I've
had nearly 0 OS crashes on any of the 25 or so machines on campus
while running 1.0.

>-- Terminal/Shell have a bug in that they don't properly update utmp or
>wtmp.

Yep.  There is at least one user level bugfix for this on the archives
which utilizes the LoginHook/LogoutHook stuff to do this correctly.
Hopefully NeXT will get this working a bit better in 2.0 as well.
Of course, like any bugs, they should also be reported through the proper
channels (bug_next via campus support person for educational folks) to make
sure they are put in the bugs database to be fixed.

>-- NetInfo cloning does NOT appear to work. After setting up the proper

I haven't worked with this under 1.0 but it was able to get it working
under 0.9 without too much difficulty.  It happened to have some
constraints about subnets and prioritizing access to servers that made it
less than ideal for me, so I haven't used it since then.  This should be a
good question for your NeXT Systems Engineer for your area to work out with
you in case it is a problem with configuration rather than a real bug with
clone servers.  Also, if it is a real bug, it is good if you can
demonstrate it to the SE so that he can take it back to the ranch to get it
properly fixed.

>-- A BIG bug! NMSERVER/PORTMAP/NIBINDD (all started from /etc/rc) seem
>to have problems when an RPC timeout occurs. The errors look like this: 

I haven't seen this and don't have any insights.

>The EMACS tutorial (only 800 lines or so) was left off the distribution. 

Let NeXT know and in the meantine copy it from one of your other hosts or
pick it up from prep.ai.mit.edu.

>WriteNow STILL has no underline and CANNOT do accents properly (puts
>them off to the side, not over the letter where they belong). For a
>machine with WYSIWYG DPS, you'd expect better.  FrameMaker does it
>correctly! 

I think this was discussed here before.  I seem to remember someone saying
that the author of WriteNow believed that underlining was a poor substitute
for italics and therefore wasn't needed.  A nice argument, but I don't buy
it.  You'll probably have to file that as a suggestion with NeXT.  The
accenting problem is a problem with the Text class, if I remember
correctly.  I think that a version of the fixed Text class is forthcoming
(hopefully 2.0) and this will be fixed in a more global fashion.
FrameMaker probably isn't using the Text class and therefore implements
their own, more correct solution.

gerrit