[comp.sys.mac.system] Gatekeeper 1.2 bugs

chrisj@ut-emx.uucp (Chris Johnson) (05/15/91)

This is just a quick note to let the my fellow netters know that a couple
of bugs have been reported in Gatekeeper 1.2 (it's release was recently
announced in this newsgroup).

The bugs all result in Gatekeeper failing to load during startup.  Some
cause Gatekeeper to fail gracefully - it draws an X over its startup icon and
lets the boot continue normally - while others simply cause the Mac to crash.

These problems do not affect all users, but clearly have to go.  I'm currently
researching them and would certainly like to have them worked out by the
end of the week, although I have no way of knowing whether I'll actually 
be able to do so.  No matter what I do, *I* can't get it to fail, so the
debugging is going slower than I would like.

One thing that has become apparent is that some or all of the problems relate
to the amount of free memory in the system and application heaps during
startup.  This is why there've been no reports of these startup problems from
System 7.0 users -- System 7 tends to guarantee a greater amount of free 
memory is present in those heaps during startup than have previous systems.

In case you're wondering, Gatekeeper 1.2 was tested almost entirely on 
System 6.0.x Macs, so I still do not know why this problem didn't show up
until the release version.  Except, of course, that almost all of my testers
can run 1.2 without problems, so it may just be that there's something spec-
ial about all their Macs.  Maybe their Macs felt privileged to be testing
Gatekeeper and were on their best behavior at the time.  :-)

Anyway, the problem is known and will be fixed somehow - hopefully this week.

Sorry for any trouble.

----Chris (Johnson)
----Author of Gatekeeper
----chrisj@emx.utexas.edu