K312240@AEARN.BITNET (Klaus Kusche) (03/17/90)
Dear Mailing List: First a question to all of you: I received some personal replies concerning the bug reports I sent in the last few weeks. I would suggest that all these responses (or at least those confirming the problem or giving more info on it) should go to the list, not just to myself, for two reasons: Firstly to let all who might be concerned know that there really is (or isn't) a problem and how to get around it (in order to save them the time and trouble of rediscovering known bugs again and again, and to avoid investments into non-working combinations of products), and secondly to put some pressure on the companies to give hints on coming around the problems, to correct the bugs, and to write better software in general (if I were a company, I wouldn't like to see my name on ten bug reports per day on this list). Do you agree on this policy, or are there strong arguments why all the bug messages should be strictly personal? Secondly, about the companie's bug handling strategies in general (the following now relates to Inmos, but all the other companies are invited to start improving their support services, too): * There should be an email address to which bug reports can be sent (without being >nul'led immediately). Filling out forms is too time-consuming, and sending them by smail is slow and expensive (UK mail is known to be especially slow and unreliable...). Waiting for a bug report response more than two months is intolerable!!! Academics may send any amount of email at no cost, but are usually very short on stamp, phone and Fax budget. Of course, this address must also be made known to us!!! * There should be a short receive acknowledge and response within a week: Bug known/new/not reproducible/related to hardware or other software. Correction is .../provided soon/not possible/done in next release. We need more info about... * Known bugs should be reported to all users as soon as possible by: + Providing a printed regular newsletter to all users (or having a section for that for example in the OUG newsletter). + Posting a short message on this and related mailing lists. + Providing bug descriptions in an email archive. ... or whatever (any other suggestions??) (a dialup bullboard system in the US is not exactly what European academics are looking for...). Just as an example how things shouldn't work: The Occam Toolset /v bug seems to have been discovered by other users in ***Sept 88***. It is still not documented anywhere (I do read the official docu), and it did cost me a few days. I know that companies don't like to talk about their product's bugs in the public, but I feel more comfortable with a company which is known to inform users promptly about problems discovered by anybody, than with a company which lets me find out by myself... About networking restrictions: There are some networks which forbid mail between two commercial partners, but as long as at least one of the communication partners is academic, there shouldn't be any legal problem on any net (please correct me if I'm wrong). Please try to get things moving ... ************************************************************************ * Klaus Kusche * * Research Institute for Symbolic Computation * * Johannes Kepler University Tel: +43 7236 3231 67 * * A-4040 Linz Telex: (Austria) 22323 uni li a * * Austria (Europe) Fax: +43 7236 3231 30 * * * * Bitnet: K312240@AEARN * * Arpa/CS/Internet: K312240%AEARN.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU * * UUCP: mcvax!aearn.bitnet!K312240 * * Janet: k312240@earn.aearn or k312240%aearn@earn-relay * ************************************************************************