Should Dan post full details of his tty bugs?

Scott Schwartz schwartz at karl.cs.psu.edu
Sat May 11 12:24:07 AEST 1991


| >patch some obscure bug with tty.  An undergrad with a lot of free time
| >on his hands (which is the majority, let's face it) is going to be
| >a lot more enthusiastic about spending a few hours with the old manuals

So logically you should recruit them to help you fix the problem.
Unfortunately there is usually an adversarial relationship between the
users of a computer system and the people who run it.  Kinda like the
government in general, isn't it. :-) The fact that unix source code is
AT&T top-secret doesn't help matters any either.  Is it sensible that
the sources to mission critical software is unavailable to the people
who have to use it?

| >The best thing to
| >do is for Dan send the fix to the developers and drop the subject.  Maybe
| >that way we can prevent even more people from learning the trick.
| 
| That would have been GREAT at the outset, but now the damage is done.

Dan has been complaining about this for years.  Like it or not,
vendors often don't fix important bugs on a timely basis.  Sometimes
the best thing to do is to nudge them.



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