sidney@borland.com (Sidney Markowitz) (03/30/91)
I have established an email address, bugs@borland.com, to which people
can send reports of bugs in any Borland language product. Mail sent to
bugs@borland.com will end up in the hands of a QA person who will
verify the bug and if it is a previously unknown one make sure that it
is tracked and given to R&D to be fixed in a patch, maintenance
release or future version.
Please note that we do not yet have Tech Support or Customer Service
hooked in to our Internet connection, so this is not an address for
asking questions or asking for help with your program. It is for
reporting what you are reasonably sure are bugs in a Borland language
product so that they can get fixed. Reports should contain enough
detail so that anyone could follow the steps to reproduce the problem,
and you should fix all warning messages, remove all device drivers and
TSRs and eliminate as much code as you can while still demonstrating
the problem before you report it.
In most cases, bugs@borland.com will not send confirmation, fixes or
workarounds in response to problem reports. This is a first step in
providing services on the Internet, and other tech support and
customer services will still have to be obtained via other channels.
You should include a working email address in case QA needs to reach
you for clarification. Do not rely on the mail header providing a
return path back to you: With all the contortions it will take to get
the message to QA (who are also not on the Internet yet), the header
may not survive in a useable form.
I have crossposted this message to a number of newsgroups where bug
reports often appear even though they may not be exactly on the topic
of the newsgroup. I hope that at least some of those reports could be
sent to bugs@borland.com where they will do more good. Please be
considerate of net traffic and don't unthinkingly followup this
message to all those groups.
-- sidney markowitz <sidney@borland.com>
Borland International (Languages - R&D)al@well.sf.ca.us (Alfred Fontes) (04/01/91)
sidney@borland.com (Sidney Markowitz) writes: >I have established an email address, bugs@borland.com, to which people >In most cases, bugs@borland.com will not send confirmation, fixes or >workarounds in response to problem reports. So why should anyone take the
lutwak@athena.mit.edu (Robert Lutwak) (04/02/91)
In article <1991Mar30.030352.2451@borland.com> sidney@borland.com (Sidney Markowitz) writes: >I have established an email address, bugs@borland.com, to which people >can send reports of bugs in any Borland language product. > > >In most cases, bugs@borland.com will not send confirmation, fixes or >workarounds in response to problem reports. This is a first step in >providing services on the Internet, and other tech support and >customer services will still have to be obtained via other channels. Let me get this straight: Last time I encountered a bug in a Borland product, it took me six months to convince the you-must-have-made-pointer-error technical servicers that there was, in fact, a bug. Finally, you sent me a free upgrade. Now you expect me not only to debug your compiler for you, but you're not even going to send me "confirmation, fixes, or workarounds," so that I have to buy the "new, improved" version. Sign me up.
cadsi@ccad.uiowa.edu (CADSI) (04/02/91)
From article <1991Apr1.201525.19100@athena.mit.edu>, by lutwak@athena.mit.edu (Robert Lutwak): > In article <1991Mar30.030352.2451@borland.com> sidney@borland.com (Sidney Markowitz) writes: > > Let me get this straight: > Last time I encountered a bug in a Borland product, it took me six > months to convince the you-must-have-made-pointer-error technical servicers > that there was, in fact, a bug. Finally, you sent me a free upgrade. Now > you expect me not only to debug your compiler for you, but you're not even > going to send me "confirmation, fixes, or workarounds," so that I have to > buy the "new, improved" version. > Sign me up. This is gonna sound nasty, but, do you support your software, or is it on the market? I don't mean to be mean here, just a question of experience. BTW, if it took you six months, you worked too hard. I've definitely found it easier to work around bugs. I definitely speak from experience as the code part of my staff ports now works on 22 different operating systems (including the CDC Cyber NOS/VE stuff - oooohhh, ick). Just send your stuff in and feel a part of the system. Till you own a Borland, thats all you get. Sucks don't it? Thats known as American incentive. I note your address is Athena. You oughta know abut the multitudes of BUG reports that are not quite bugs in X. Some certainly are, some certainly aren't. Gotta filter somehow. (Borland, 6 months is a little long though. Even IBM (AIX) gets back before a few days). |----------------------------------------------------------------------------| |Tom Hite | The views expressed by me | |Manager, Product development | are mine, not necessarily | |CADSI (Computer Aided Design Software Inc. | the views of CADSI. | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) (04/02/91)
In article <1991Apr1.201525.19100@athena.mit.edu> lutwak@athena.mit.edu (Robert Lutwak) writes: > Now >you expect me not only to debug your compiler for you, but you're not even >going to send me "confirmation, fixes, or workarounds," so that I have to >buy the "new, improved" version. I don't think that's what they're saying. They're saying that sending mail to bugs@borland.com is not the way to get personalized customer service. Many users encounter minor problems, and simply want to inform the vendor of it, in the hope that it will eventually be fixed (vendors don't fix bugs they don't know about). I do this all the time with some of my vendors, but if if I had to make a phone call I'd never bother; but I have no problem with firing off bug report email and forgetting about it (this explains why I file an average of 50 bug/suggestion reports a year to Symbolics, but have never called a VCR manufacturer). -- Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar
dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu (Duncan Murdoch) (04/02/91)
In article <1991Apr2.042059.25764@ccad.uiowa.edu> cadsi@ccad.uiowa.edu (CADSI) writes: > >(Borland, 6 months is a little >long though. Even IBM (AIX) gets back before a few days). The new bugs@borland arrangement sounds somewhat like the informal arrangement one of the Compuserve sysops has had in place for about 6 months or a year. If you sent him email (via the Internet gateway), he'd pass it on the the tech support people, who would treat it as if it had arrived by postal mail. This didn't work very well. I sent in a number of bug reports, and for a couple of them, I received a letter several months later saying something like "I couldn't duplicate your bug. Could you send us more details?" That's a reasonable request, but coming 4 or 5 months after I sent the report, it's awfully hard to remember exactly what the details were, especially as Borland didn't even give the date of my report, much less a copy of it or a summary. In other cases I received no acknowledgement at all. Maybe I'll get it in a few months, or maybe my report was lost in the mail. If Sidney Markowitz is listening, I'd make the following suggestion to him. Modify your rules for bugs@borland.com a little bit: as soon as you receive a report, send an acknowledgement of receipt, including your internal tracking number (or whatever you use to keep track of reports). If someone really wants to know the status of their report, let them call tech support, quoting the number, and find out. And if you want clarification, call/write back within a few weeks, not a few months, and give some hints as to which problem you're asking about. Duncan Murdoch dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu
horstman@mathcs.sjsu.edu (Cay Horstmann) (04/02/91)
In article <23964@well.sf.ca.us> al@well.sf.ca.us (Alfred Fontes) writes: >sidney@borland.com (Sidney Markowitz) writes: > >>I have established an email address, bugs@borland.com, to which people >>In most cases, bugs@borland.com will not send confirmation, fixes or >>workarounds in response to problem reports. > >So why should anyone take the Let me finish Alfred's post: trouble to send stuff there? Why indeed, Sidney? Can't you guys at minimum acknowledge that you got the stuff? That you took one of the following actions: (1) Ignored it (2) Determined it was not a bug but a feature or user error (3) Determined it was indeed a bug It would be nice, of course, if in case (3) you could offer to send a fix once it is available, but just knowing that something is indeed a bug is pretty helpful. Since all this can be done by email, it should be fairly low-cost (or do you expect THOUSANDS of bug reports a day? You COULD post a list of known bugs and require that anyone submitting a new one first check the list.) Cay
janl@ifi.uio.no (Jan Nicolai Langfeldt) (04/03/91)
<Lots of bad stuff about Borland deleted> Since evrybody is critizizing I thought I'd make a positive contribution: When I (Borland) had a elusive bug in a mamouth program (The program worked under TP4 but would sometimes freak with TP5). I looked long and hard at the symptoms, wrote a fax explaining up and down, back and forth how the bug behaved. A week later they faxed back and asked fore more info. They got it (we even talked on the phone). And one week later they faxed us again: move f***ed things up. Problem fixed! Hm, I wonder if it meant anything that we had the Proffesional package? Anyway: Borland has always been fair to me on other occations. It's another thing with their Norwegian representative... Nicolai, your friendly alaround amateur (bugs made while you wait!). Nicolai Langfeldt, Internet: janl@ifi.uio.no Quote: Life is too important to be taken seriously - Oscar Wilde (translated and retranslated)
sidney@borland.com (Sidney Markowitz) (04/03/91)
horstman@mathcs.sjsu.edu (Cay Horstmann) writes: >Why indeed, Sidney? Can't you guys at minimum acknowledge that you got the >stuff? That you took one of the following actions: [...] >Since all this can be done by email, it should be fairly >low-cost (or do you expect THOUSANDS of bug reports a day? [...] >post a list of known bugs and require that anyone submitting a new one first >check the list.) It would not work to require people to do any such thing, as demonstrated by the number of people who did not even notice that the announcement 1) answered the question why send mail to bugs@borland.com if it isn't going to be acknowledged; and 2) asked people not to respond with followups to all these newsgroups, since followups would not be appropriate topics for them. I am posting this message in the (vain?) hope that it will lead to a net reduction in off-topic postings. Please don't followup, especially to all the newsgroups this is crossposted to. Borland Tech Support *does* receive thousands of calls and electronic messages a day by telephone, Compuserve, BIX, and Genie. Most of these are a matter of education, RTFM, bugs in user programs, procedural errors, customer service questions, and some errors, omissions or confusions in the documentation, hardware or software incompatibilities, known bugs, and sometimes new bugs in Borland software. Eventually we will have the additional software, procedures, and trained personnel to add to that whatever load will result by handling all of that from the Internet too. As a very first step I have set up bugs@borland.com which is a channel that bypasses the normal tech support filtering to get what I hope will tend to be useful bug reports directly into the hands of a QA person whose job is making sure that bugs are found and removed from Borland's language products. This is a form of service that did not exist before. The benefit is in the form of faster turnaround on bug fixes and so better products for our customers. It is not a substitute for any of our tech support channels. It is the first, not the last service that we will be able to offer via the Internet. -- sidney markowitz <sidney@borland.com> Borland International (Languages - R&D)
jmartin@secola.Columbia.NCR.COM (John Martinez) (04/03/91)
Personally, I think it's great that Borland is getting with the 90's, realizing that "the net" is one of the chief ways professional programmers (i.e. users of their products) communicate, and has taken a step toward providing support on that medium! I think a lot of people have deliberately misconstrued the original "warning" about not being able to reply to every message - Borland has always gone out of their way to help me when I had a legitimate problem with their products, and I expect the same will be true out of bugs@Borland.Com. If 6,500 Pascal/c++ neophytes all report that the compiler is "broken" because they have declared a pointer and then have strange results when they assign to it, I can't blame Borland for getting exasperated. In time, they will probably develop their own FAQ which they will turn into form-letter replies for some of these people. But, (BORLAND ARE YOU LISTENING??) if they wanted to get _really_ progressive, they would start actively seeking "suggestions" of what we really want from their products, perhaps establishing a "features@borland.com" or, better, a c_features, and pascal_features, and quattro_features ,etc. @borland.com to let us write directly to the development/product management teams to let them know what we _really_ expect from them. (All this is IMHO, of course :*] ) -(-- John -- John V.Martinez NCR Network Products Division jmartin@secola.Columbia.NCR.COM (803)739-7671 vplus:633-8854
nkraft@crash.cts.com (Norman Kraft) (04/04/91)
In article <1991Apr2.195602.10059@ifi.uio.no> janl@ifi.uio.no writes: > ><Lots of bad stuff about Borland deleted> > >Since evrybody is critizizing I thought I'd make a positive contribution: > ... > >Hm, I wonder if it meant anything that we had the Proffesional package? > >Anyway: Borland has always been fair to me on other occations. It's another >thing with their Norwegian representative... Yes, Borland is quite fair sometimes, but this does depend on the context in which you contact them. Via USENET (bugs@borland), there are certainly limitations, and we have no idea who among their staff they have put to watching the incoming mail. Contacted by phone, they are quite reasonable (if the problem isn't *too* complicated), respond to faxes fairly quickly, and respond very well in their CIS, BIX, and GEnie conferences (at least if your problem is interesting enough...). Letters seem to be the worst way, and the most knowledgable support folks seem to live on CIS and GEnie. The quality of advice found on those pay-as-you-go forums is, generally, far better than what they give over the phone. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Norman Kraft INET : nkraft@crash.cts.com Director, Software Development UUCP : ucsd!crash!nkraft Postal Buddy Corporation GEnie: N.KRAFT3 San Diego, CA FIDO : 1:102/943 FAX : (619) 272-3175 "Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." - A. Einstein --------------------------------------------------------------------------
wallyk@bicycle.WV.TEK.COM (Wally Kramer) (04/05/91)
In article <8366@crash.cts.com> nkraft@crash.cts.com (Norman Kraft) writes: ... > Contacted by phone, they are quite reasonable > (if the problem isn't *too* complicated), ... > The quality of advice found on [CIS and GEnie] is, generally, > far better than what they give over the phone. It seems the phone support is geared toward novice hand holding. I've attempted to report a number of bugs; the handling for them has been fairly consistent: (a) They listen to my explanation of the bug and promptly forget the details. (b) They ask a handful of basic questions, such as "did you declare the variable?" or "did you include stdio.h?". (c) Then then say "Hmmmmm. Would you state the problem again, please?" (d) They then try to match it against a known bug. The phone-support algorithm for bug-matching and identification is often humorous: me: "The 'errno' value from 'findnext' is illegal." them: "Are you including <errno.h>?" me: "I don't need to; the value in errno is 19211."; them: "Oh, that sounds like a bug in the IDE project file." (e) If it's not a known bug, they would really prefer source code on a disk mailed in or a fax. The phone people don't want to bother with more than about 5-6 lines of code over the phone to reproduce a bug. As a result, I've found a few bugs that I was unsuccessful in reporting. bugs@borland.com seems like the answer to my frustration, even if they don't acknowledge it directly--though it'd be nice if a daemon auto-replied the transmission. This way I can submit the bug in full, and it can be forwarded repeatedly without distortion to the Right Person. Over the phone, they probably talk to so many people who, for example, aren't sure what a compiler does that this rather pessimistic disposition is an asset. ----- Wally Kramer contracted from Step Technology, Portland, Oregon 503 244 1239 wallyk@orca.wv.tek.com +1 503 685 2658