🚀 go-pugleaf

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