🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4989@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

   In article <DOWDING.91Mar15093959@sunset.ai.sri.com>, dowding@ai.sri.com (John Dowding) writes:
   > Who knows how many times I have spent hours tracking down bugs in
   > products that the vendor already knew was there?

   How many times did you *ask* whether they already knew about the mistake?
   From my own experience, SUN *did* tell you whether your problem was a
   known one (after you submitted it), provided the person submitting the
   report was the official contact person for the site.

I think that you are missing the point here, Richard.  It doesn't save
me any time time to find out that the vendor already knew about a bug
after I have traced through it enough to submit a bug report.

   By the way, my understanding of a "support contract" is that information
   like this "feature such and such has mistake so and so, we intend to fix
   it soon/in the next release/eventually, in the mean time here is how to
   work around it" is one of the things that such a contract is FOR.  

Of course I am not suggesting that the net replace the role of support
contracts, but a support contract is only useful when you have already
determined that the problem that you are having is a bug in the
product (as opposed to a bug in your code), and you have distilled it
to the point of submitting a minimal example in a bug report.

   > In any case, it is certainly not the vendors[sci]place to tell us what
   > should and should not be discussed on the net.

   I'm not a vendor.  And the point of my posting was not to say
   "thou shalt not" but to say "DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR, go FIRST to the
   people who really DO have the answers, as opposed to the people who
   only think they have the answers."

Yes, the point of your posting was not to say "thou shalt not", but I
was not replying to your posting, but to the gentleman representing
Arity who said that this newsgroup was an inappropriate forum for
discussing complaints about their products.

Also, I disagree with your assertion that it is the vendors that
really do have the answers.  In many cases I believe that it is the
users of the product who really understand what the limitations are.
Very often, the implementors of a product will not actually use it to get
any work done.


John Dowding
dowding@ai.sri.com