jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson) (08/12/89)
There has been a significant discussion in this group recently about
the IBM policy on bug reporting, fixes, and PTF distribution. In one
particularly nasty piece of mail which I received from someone inside
the AIX group in Austin, I was assured that this policy is in the best
interests of "the customers", and is the best way to ensure that we
receive the fixes and updates in the shortest possible time. Oddly
enough, just at this time, I have received PTF 1723 for X on AIX. It
fixes a number of problems, and brings the software mostly up to MIT
V11R3 level. Now, several people from IBM have claimed, in this group
and in mail to me, that these fixes and the R3 upgrade were done last
January. That means it took 7 MONTHS for that fix to get to me; if
this is the fastest way IBM can do it, I hope they don't ever decide
to use the slowest way...
Perhaps, though, we can use my experience with this as a model to
help us all ("us" being IBM/AIX customers) in the future. What we
all object to most strongly is that IBM refuses to tell us, in a timely
fashion, about bugs discovered by other customers, or about PTFs that
have been made to fix those bugs. I found out about the PTF for X
from someone else on the net. If the people who read this group can
post a short note whenever they get a PTF from IBM, describing what
it is supposed to fix (if possible), the rest of us could then call
the our support contacts and demand that upgrade (if we wanted to).
I will kick things off in my next posting.
jwjmr@jrowan.austin.ibm.com (Jim Rowan) (08/30/89)
In article <556@pan.UUCP> jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson) writes: > >There has been a significant discussion in this group recently about >the IBM policy on bug reporting, fixes, and PTF distribution. In one ... > If the people who read this group can >post a short note whenever they get a PTF from IBM, describing what >it is supposed to fix (if possible), the rest of us could then call >the our support contacts and demand that upgrade (if we wanted to). > Updatep -A (lppname), ala 'updatep -A opsys' will produce a one-liner for each fix which has been applied to the machine. This includes everything, not just the ones that were (newly) applied in PTF 1745, for instance, but if you do this before and after, you can get the diffs. Admittedly, one line of description is often not enough to get a good idea of what the fix applies to, but it's better than nothing... -- Jim Rowan (My ravings are my own, and don't belong to my employer.) cs.utexas.edu!ibmaus!jrowan (outside the wall) or jmr@jrowan.austin.ibm.com (inside the wall)