[650] in Release_7.7_team
key repeat rate
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Thu Jul 25 00:30:52 1996
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 00:30:47 EDT
(I'm sorry, I should have sent this mail at least a week ago.)
well, afs seems to have given us a little reprieve here.
when I originally reported the key repeate rate differences, I was
told that we didn't want to override the vendor on things like this.
However, we were going to document how users could fix it in their
dotfiles. I probably wasn't terribly verbal about it, but I did
mention once or twice that I was looking for that documentation. I
finally saw the relevant documentation the night the release was
supposed to go out. It said "see the xset manpage", which I though
was a little short, I was hoping for a command that I could put in my
dotfiles to solve the problem. In addition, when I looked at the
manpage I didn't see anything about the problem. After consulting
with several people it became appearant that it was not possible to
make this change except at the time the X server is started. All in
all I was rather frusterated by the whole experience.
I think there are several lessons that may be learned from this
incident.
1) Before we dicide that documenting a user level work-around for a
problem, we need to make sure one is possible.
2) The beta and early test periods are for testing the documentation
too. If the documentation had been available for review before the
night the release was supposed to go out, this problem would have been
caught sooner.
3) someone should actually look at the documents we reference in our
documentation.
(This is not meant to ba an attack on anyone. I just want to avoid
our putting out documentation that is wrong, since it is likely that
users will notice it, and think less of athena.)
Jonathon
