Bugs in the BSD sources ??

[Chris Torek]

>In article <1802 at cooper.cooper.EDU> hak at cooper.cooper.EDU (Jeff Hakner) writes:
>>Are the BSD sources, archived @uunet, among other places,
>>the sources to actual, working, tested programs?

In article <1989Sep30.060807.15103 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp
(Henry Spencer) writes:
>Uh, this may come as a surprise, but universities generally do not have
>quality-control departments.

*I* am the quality control department, or at least Kirk, Mike, and Keith
[both Keiths] sometimes think so :-) .

More seriously: the basic problem here is that the stuff on uunet
is built by taking the current source and back-converting it (applying
changes to old revisions in the SCCS files).  Code built this way
is hard to test, because Berkeley CSRG no longer have machines running
4.3BSD-tahoe on which to test them.  It does seem, though, that someone
should at least run them once through `cc' to check for syntax errors.

Also (quite seriously) in many cases it is a matter of getting work
done.  CSRG are just five people; they simply do not have time to test
everything released this way.  These fixes only get out because Keith
Bostic uses his `spare' time to slap them together and ship them off.
If he took much more time for them, nothing else would get done.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris