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Re: I love Executor, but...
Executor 1.2.2 is exceedingly close (a couple of hours of fiddling
before a copy is sent to Pete Wickersham at Stone design for testing
on some of their hardware) to being released.
I'll explain why it's 1.2.2 and not 1.3 as soon as it's released (I
don't have much time for anything until it's released).
I'm really not sure what's up with Word and Excel not working. I
wrote the Executor manual (approx. 100 pages) using Word under
Executor and didn't experience any trouble, except some printing
trouble related to the ARDI logo EPS having too many "def"s for the
output device (NeXT PostScript is like that) and that the output
device didn't like our gray scale TIFFs. We don't *use* Excel much
over here, but significant amounts of our testers time is in fact
spent testing it.
BUT, we do know of a problem with our kernel mods that turns out to
almost definitely be related to a bug in NeXT's kernel. We have a
contact within NeXT who has been very valuable, but we do not have
access to the NeXT kernel source. That alone cost us at least a
couple of weeks or more of disassembling mach and poking around. I
believe the new mods that will be distributed with Executor 1.2.2
will fix the machine hang problem (which appears to hit some people
much more often than others; we only recently even figured out how to
make it happen over here) on NS3.0 machines. The bug that I'm
refering to is not totally fixed under NS3.0, but it appears to be
better over there, but we clean up the mistake that we see NeXT
making and that's sufficient under NS3.0, but not under NS2.x.
One of the things that has been dogging us is a lack of machinery on
which to test Executor. "Normal" programs can be developed on one
machine and should work on any configurations. Executor doesn't fit
in that category because we have to modify the kernel, we need "key
codes" and (starting with Executor 1.2.2) we provide the ability to
write directly to the screen.
I'll post much more information about the status of Executor and
ARDI, but I do want to get 1.2.2 out ASAP. One thing though: if
1.2.2 doesn't cure the mystery death problems that some of you are
having in Word and Excel, then I'll set all our manpower (except for
Mat Hostetter; he's off limits) to finding and fixing those bugs and
releasing 1.2.3 with just those bugs fixed before releasing 1.3.
BTW, just to not leave you wondering, we'll be supporting Executor on
NeXT hardware until the cows come home. I'll elaborate shortly.
Thanks for the feedback.
--Cliff