🚀 go-pugleaf

This has been kind of a fun discussion to watch.
 
I don't have anything useful to contribute, but some of this discussion made me
think of a little anecdote:
 
About a year and a half ago, the entire local phone system in the Washington,
DC area went down.  Totally.  For about a day and a half.  Thoroughly messing
things up around here.  As I remember it, this coincided, within a couple days,
with similar outages in several other major cities.  The problem was traced to
switching equipment manufactured by DSC Communications (which, by the way, is
centered in Plano, Texas, my hometown).
 
Seems DSC had just sent out a small update to the software that runs their
switching equipment.  It patched one line of code (some newspaper accounts said
one BYTE).  Apparently that single change had a bug in it that would cause the
whole shebang to overload and shut down under certain conditions.
 
When I read about the cause in the paper, my first thought was "Oh, boy, heads
are rolling in Plano!"  My second thought was that the poor programmer who
authored the fix probably wasn't in any trouble at all.  The guy who lost his
job was undoubtedly the manager who said "This is such a tiny fix, it doesn't
need to go through QA!"
 
A word to the wise is sufficient...
 
Just the same, Dave Every's "Use at your own risk" solution sounds like a
pretty good way to go.
 
Rich Gillam
GE Information Services