[26] in Zephyr_Bugs
[pete@ATHENA.MIT.EDU: Zephyr problems]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Mon May 21 12:37:14 1990
Date: Mon, 21 May 90 12:36:36 -0400
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: marc@MIT.EDU
Cc: raeburn@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, bug-zephyr@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, release@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: marc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU's message of Sat, 19 May 90 12:19:08 EDT <9005191619.AA17703@STEVE-DALLAS.MIT.EDU>
From: marc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: marc@MIT.EDU
Usmail: Marc Horowitz, 3 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: (617)225-6447
Date: Sat, 19 May 90 12:19:08 EDT
I would recommend seriously against you doing that. There were some
mistakes, but none were critical. Jik, you flamed about breaking "the
useful zpunt feature." Please type "where zpunt" and explain to me
again where Athena has a commitment to keep that. (I'm really playing
devil's advocate. I wouldn't think of intentionally removing such a
useful feature.)
Whether or not there is a program in Athena's release which takes
advantage of the punt and unpunt opcodes is not the point. The point
is that the opcodes existed in 6.4R, and were therefore available to
the general user community, and then they were removed without any
explanation from the 7.0 version of zwgc.
Yes, you're playing devil's advocate here, and it's stupid. You know
as well as I do that punt/unpunt was removed only because of
carelessness, not because of any conscious decision. It is quite
stupid to defend carelessness for any reason.
Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I'm near the end of my rope with
zephyr in this release. I'm doing my best to make sure that we can do
the release with the sources that we were given, but it isn't being
made easy for me by the zephyr team.
The new code contains fixes, some of which I would call top priority.
One is the oft-complained about PGRP signal bug in zwgc. If you
insist on backing out to 6.4R, at least let me reinstall this change.
At this point, we are not planning on backing out to 6.4R, so this is
moot. However, I think I should point out that if we do find it
necessary to back out to 6.4R's zephyr sources, it will not be a
choice we made because we wanted to, it will be a choice we made
because the problems given to us to deal with by the zephyr team were
too severe for quality assurance to "sign off" on zephyr as being
ready for this release.
Believe it or not, one of QA's official jobs is to verify, in whatever
way they see fit, that project code given to Release Engineering for a
release is high-quality enough to go into the release. The zephyr
sources for 7.0 are the first instance where I have found myself
tempted to use that authority (along with the other members of the QA
team, if they concur) to pull a project. I don't want to do it, but
that's life.
jik
