ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (05/17/89)
Several non-ISIS users seem to be trying to pick up the ISIS V12 alpha release. This makes no sense at all. It will give you the wrong impression of our software, and will make for a generally unsatisfactory experience. Let me explain briefly what our release strategy is: When we develop major new pieces of ISIS, we first use the system internally for a few weeks and run our various diagnostic programs on it. We try to test it out on a range of systems and OS releases, but this is always hard. The number of versions of, for example, SUN OS4.0 is already up to 3 or 4, and some versions with the same number are not actually identical depending on what day you picked up the release from SUN, HP or whatever. So, when we think our stuff is sort of solid, we allow a small number of alpha sites to pick it up. We expect that almost all of these sites will run into problems, some major and some minor. This type of work requires enough knowledge of the system to make sense of bugs and error messages and correct them locally. And, you would normally need to have used ISIS enough to be able to pound on it in a way different from what we do at Cornell. After a few weeks of this, we go to a beta-release. This type is actually believed to be solid. Usually we see much less in the way of problems with a beta-release, but we continue to expect trouble at this stage. Normal users are encouraged NOT to take alpha or beta releases. Why cause yourself and your users problems? And, the whole point is that when we get to the actual release, the system should be well "shaken down" and on a wide range of OS and hardware varieties. we'll let you know when we get to the full release, in a few weeks. Meanwhile, thanks for bearing with us. Ken