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- Submitted-by: rchrist@uswnvg.UUCP (Ron Christian)
-
- Recently, in the process of getting a nasty bug fixed, I asked a
- computer vendor if this bug fix would be communicated back to the Unix
- standards organization from which they got their bits, since the bug
- was in the original code. (Both computer vendor and standards
- organization will remain nameless for now.) The vendor's response was
- "there is currently no mechanism to communicate bug reports back to
- <organization>". This sounded interesting, so I asked a couple other
- vendors if they reported bugs or bugfixes. I got one "yes" response
- and one other "currently no mechanism" response.
-
- Now, this is not by any means a significant sampling of computer
- vendors, but it leads me to ask the question in this forum. Are
- vendors who produce an ostensibly standards-based Unix expected to
- report bugs back to the standards organization, or is it the general
- expectation of the industry that bug fixes are value added by the
- vendor and hence proprietary? Or, is there simply too much overhead
- involved in reporting bugs in some reasonably structured fashion? If
- vendors typically don't report bugs, how are standards organizations
- (USL, OSF, Posix, X/Open, etc) made aware of them?
-
- I guess I'm interested in how the system is supposed to work, and also
- people's observations on how the system works (or doesn't work) in real
- life.
-
- Thanks in advance.
-
-
- Ron
-
-
- Volume-Number: Volume 27, Number 86
-
-