geoff@desint.UUCP (03/15/86)
In article <227@umcp-cs.UUCP> chris@umcp-cs.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes: > Change for the better is > a noble goal, but abuse and insults are unlikely to acheive it. > (Please note that I am not speaking of Forrest's article, but rather > some of those that preceded it.) Nor, I should point out, is he speaking of Tom Keller's original posting. I think it's about time we reviewed a few FACTS in this case. I have seen a lot of people calling Tom an ungrateful crybaby, as well as some names that were much less polite. In defending him, I have received a few tart responses myself, though nobody has called me names. 1. The software that prompted Tom's posting was originally offered COMMERCIALLY for sale on the net. The author was asking $250 for a tape, mostly to cover his expected distribution costs. Later, he generously decided to forego the price and distribute via mod.sources. 2. Both the original (commercial) announcements and the README files that came with the software contained a statement to the effect that it worked on one manufacturer's proprietary UNIX, and had also been "ported to Bell and Berkeley, and should run on both systems without any modifications" and a statement that it should port to XENIX easily, though it hadn't tried (Tom's system is a XENIX one). 3. Other than these statements, there were no statements made about any system or compiler dependencies in the software. 4. In fact, the software is quite system-dependent in a number of ways. Long names were only one of the dependencies; even after crossing that I hurdle I had to fix what seemed to be an endless string of null-pointer bugs before the software even came up without core dumping. There were also a number of minor makefile problems. Now Tom's posting was, admittedly, a cry of pain and an expression of frustration. Having gone through the same six-hour porting process to try to make use of a software that sounded really neat, I can sympathize with his frustration, although he probably should have waited a day before posting. But let's remember that all Tom ever asked was that system dependencies be marked. Those of you who have flamed back along the lines of "do you expect us to cater to every minor system in the world?" are guilty of incorrect reading and should return to primary school for remedial instruction. And let's also remember that Tom wasted a large amount of his own time trying to bring this software up, and wound up with nothing to show for it. A little better "product labeling" would have allowed Tom to realize that his effort would be wasted and spend it somewhere else. Those of you who have said "if you don't like it, ignore it" are ignoring this nontrivial issue. I don't have a lot of time to waste. I don't really think it's asking very much to request that people give me enough information to make an estimate of how much time a particular program is going to cost me, so that I can make a cost/benefit tradeoff. (I have tens of programs from net.sources that I have never unpacked because the cost of un-sharing them is only reasonable if I have need of their particular functionality). If the author of this software package had been a little more sophisticated, he would have realized that there are many systems out there that still suffer from seven-character names, as well as knowing about NULL pointers. It's too bad that Tom posted before he lost his frustration, but let's not lose sight of the basic request: *please* mark all known system dependencies in your software. If you don't know what they are because you are fairly new to the UNIX world, a good substitute is to list the EXACT hardware/software configurations the software is known to work on, so that those of us who are more experienced can make an intelligent guess. Oh, and one more thing. LONG before I ever defended Tom, I got the software up and running on my system. The next thing I did was to mail documented context diff's to the author so that his next posting would be more portable. So get off my back, okay? If anybody wants diff's to solve long names and null pointers in the software that frustrated Tom, let me know and I'll mail a copy. -- Geoff Kuenning {hplabs,ihnp4}!trwrb!desint!geoff