ccsam@bullwinkle.ucdavis.edu (Sam McCall) (10/26/90)
What sort of quality assurance, if any, is done with Ultrix before it's shipped to customers? The reason I ask is that we just found out that our /bin/sh and /usr/bin/ksh users can't log in on our Decstations without getting these complaints from, apparently, almost all of the DEC-supplied clients: Starting Application Process 3320 "DECterm" X Toolkit Warning: DRM: I18NOpenFile: Couldn't open file /usr/lib/X11/uid/DXterm - DRMFailure X Toolkit Warning: Drm__OpenHierarchy: - DRMFailure Unable to open DRM User Interface Definition: These problems are in addition to our problems with various utilities misbehaving when there are 10000+ users in our YP password maps. (For example, ps, lastcomm, finger, and sendmail). As far as I can tell (going back to old Ultrix source), the misbehaviors have been around since 1.2 (I found them when I was running 3.1, reported them, and never was able to manage to get anyone to tell me they could fix it, even when I offered source-level patches). It strikes me as just incredibly amazing that these problems didn't show up in internal testing, let alone beta testing. So, I am left to wonder what, if any, sort of QA is done before shipment? Certainly we're not the only site who has bourne shell and korn shell users. Certainly, we're not the only site who has 1000+ users in our yellow pages maps. (I can say yellow pages - British Telecom didn't sue me). Since this is a blatant DEC-bashing letter, I do not encourage a waste of bandwidth for bashing responses. I do invite e-mail, however. I would love some insight into the engineering (and I use the term generously) and QA phases of Ultrix development. If appropriate, I will summarize. -sam samccall@ucdavis.edu computing services, uc davis (916) 752-2579