bug report etiquette

[Griff Smith]

In article <2338 at umd5.umd.edu>, chris at trantor.umd.edu.UUCP writes:
> >In article <2323 at umd5.umd.edu> I asked:
> >>Is the 4.3BSD [TU78] driver wrong once or twice?
> 
> It appears I insulted the driver unnecessarily.  I have yet to find
> a bug here, but...
> 
> In article <10102 at ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> ggs at ulysses.homer.nj.att.com
> (Griff Smith) writes:
> >The driver, as released in 4.3BSD, does have a few bugs - not in error
> >recovery that I know of.
> 
> ... I spotted a nice bug in mtustart...
> -- 
> In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Computer Science, +1 301 454 7163

If you had looked in your archives of comp.bugs.4bsd you would have
found the report of this "nice bug"; I sent it to Berkeley on August
11, 1987 and also filed to netnews.  That bug was introduced by someone
at Berkeley sometime between 4.3 beta and 4.3 official.  I also
reported a race in the "open" code - I will take responsibility for not
having noticed it when I overhauled the driver.

I don't want to start a war, but I am a bit miffed about this exchange
of notes about the TU78 driver.  I tried to do a careful job of quality
testing, added comments to the code to explain my assumptions, went
through a year's grief getting approval from my management to release
the code, and then followed up with more bug reports when further
problems (some beyond my control) appeared after the official release.
I also left a mail address in the source code in case problems were
discovered.

It would have been an act of simple courtesy to have asked me in
private communication first.  Not only would it have saved net
bandwidth, but the problem would probably have been diagnosed faster
and both of us would have avoided the embarrassment of a public
shouting match.  I particularly resent having my sentence "I posted
fixes to comp.bugs.4bsd for the bugs that I found" removed from the
above followup to my followup.  This twisted the reply to say "your
driver does too have bugs - look at this juicy one".  I don't think I
should have felt obliged to re-post the bug reports just to preemt this
kind of jab.

I will try to continue to follow a policy of using private mail when
questioning network articles.  After an embarrassing exchange with
Chris a few years ago, I think I have learned my lesson about public
posting.  It can be frustrating, however.  A recent private exchange
with Chris about difficulties taking his advice to port 4.3BSD "dump"
to Sun work stations broke off with a comment that could be paraphrased
as "this is left as a trivial exercise to the reader".

Chris, I respect your ability.  You have made valuable contributions to
the UNIX System software environment.  How about giving the rest of us
mortals some credit for intelligence.
-- 
Griff Smith	AT&T (Bell Laboratories), Murray Hill
Phone:		1-201-582-7736
UUCP:		{allegra|ihnp4}!ulysses!ggs
Internet:	ggs at ulysses.att.com