Trusting operating systems: vendor or university?

[Lawrence V. Cipriani]

In article <8013 at brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>In article <1133 at mcgill-vision.UUCP> mouse at mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) writes:
>>They do?  In my experience they generally ignore the bug reports.
>
>This is heavily vendor-dependent.  For example, people at Gould would
>see a remark on the "gouldbugs" mailing list, draw up the SPR on my
>behalf, and send a timely response.  That's hard to beat.
>
>>And my notion of fixing a bug involves getting
>>a fix to the person with the problem within a week.  Not "in the next
>>major release - and oh yes, that will cost you $2500[1]".
>
>This is an entirely unrealistic notion.
	A description of software maintenance in
	large responsible organizations deleted.

I'm glad you wrote your response Doug, I was going to try to say
it too but you're a better writer.  The scenario you describe is
exactly the one I work in every day.  Maybe AT&T is doing something
right on the product I work on?  I can't speak for any others.

Off on a tangent ...
I think maintenance is going to be the Achilles heel of GNU.
Its hard enough to do maintenance without worrying about what
modified code is running on the machine.  I guess we'll just
have to wait and see if GNU can survive the test of time, (how
tautological!).  And please, no lectures on GNU please, I've
heard enough.

-- 
Larry Cipriani, AT&T Network Systems and Ohio State University
Domain: lvc at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Path: ...!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!lvc (strange but true)