[3327] in testers
Should I stop reporting non-showstopper OS-bugs?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Fri Jul 18 10:59:24 1997
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 1997 10:59:01 -0400 (EDT)
To: mbarker@MIT.EDU, wdc@MIT.EDU
Cc: testers@MIT.EDU
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
I'm wondering if I should stop reporting operating system bugs
that are not showstoppers, and if I should stop recommending that
other people report such bugs.
It appears that most bug reports about the operating system that
are not showstoppers (or at least candidate-showstoppers) appear to
go to the discuss meeting and then not much happens.
For instance, from this beta cycle:
sparc 8.1.7: awk printf() doesn't like variable field widths
8.1.3 sgi: Xsgi
sparc 8.1.4: /usr/bin/awk fails to match()
8.1.4 sparc: sed -n core dumps
sparc 8.1.4: man can dump core
8.1.4 sparc: non-/-cwd system processes
(well, maybe Xsgi is a candidate-showstopper).
It takes some non-zero effort on my part to report the bugs, so I tend
to assume that if I do report them, they will eventually be forwarded
on to the vendor for resolution. If that's not going to ever happen,
I do feel like my effort is somewhat wasted.
There are a couple of things I can do here:
1) Keep reporting non-showstopper operating system bugs to
bugs/testers, optimistically hoping they'll be dealt with.
2) Report those bugs directly to Sun[*] (because my employer
contracts for software support from Sun). This is some more
work on my part, but if that's what has to be done to get
these fixed, that's what has to be done. In so doing I could
also:
a) cc bugs and/or testers as appropriate
b) not do so
3) ??
Please let me know what you think.
As for the other kinds of bugs I encounter:
* Showstopper operating system bugs clearly need to be reported,
since otherwise the productivity of the environment may
severely suffer.
* Bugs in athena-maintained software I'll continue to
report, since if no one else is willing to take
responsibility, it's within my power to develop fixes and
submit changes.
Thanks for your time!
--jhawk
----
[*] - Obviously this approach doesn't work very well for SGI bugs. I suppose I
could investigate the possibility of reporting SGI bugs through my employer,
however I'm not clear on how feasable that is. It is kind of disturbing to me
that I find more bugs under Solaris than under IRIX, as if you asked me to rate
their stability and reliability, I would certainly rate Solaris above IRIX. By
default, I guess I'd continue to report SGI bugs to bugs/testers.
