[19885] in Athena Bugs
Re: netscape and sawfish continue downward spiral of death
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (t. belton)
Thu Oct 11 09:54:02 2001
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 09:53:59 -0400 (EDT)
From: "t. belton" <tbelton@MIT.EDU>
To: John Hawkinson <jhawk@mit.edu>
cc: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>, <bugs@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20011011002704.S23491@multics.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.30L.0110110947110.12668-100000@iphigenia.mit.edu>
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On Thu, 11 Oct 2001, John Hawkinson wrote:
> It seems like we always assert it is useless to report bugs to
> netscape, but I have to wonder if this is always true.
I've done it and it seems pretty useless. Actually, I think if we ever had
concrete, trackable problems to report to them, there might be some
response, but usually the bugs we want to pass on are in the nature of
"Netscape sometimes leaks" or "Netscape sometimes crashes" - things we
don't have a clear path to reproducing, things which they already know
about, and things they presumably have no interest in trying to clean up
... especially for non-Linux Unix systems, which they have made fairly
clear they consider an orphan child. (Netscape formally refers all Sun
Netscape queries to Sun these days, for example.)
> Maybe it would be interested to have a wrapper around netscape
> that let us know how many netscapes that were cleanly started were
> not cleanly exitted. Since there seems to be precedent for such tracking
> in 3partysw land.
It'd slow things down, wouldn't it? And it'd just tell us that Netscape
doesn't exit cleanly fifty percent of the time (or thereabouts). At least
that'd be my estimate, based on anecdotal evidence from the MIT user
community over three years.
I'd rather focus on getting away from Netscape as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately none of the alternatives is QUITE ready for prime time yet.
But that time is getting closer.
