🚀 go-pugleaf

Rob Spencer, robbie@winkle.bhpese.oz.au, writes:

>However, I'd like to see DEC port almost everything else first! If they're
>going to spend development time, please let them spend it on porting
>products that we use everyday, not products that we may be able to save
>a bit of time with. It's a bit hard to patch a non-existent image!!
>(Some stuff is not expected to be available until 1994! Surely you could
>have sent me a CD distribution of the new images by then!)

The opposite is also true:  it is a bit hard to use an image that doesn't
work.

>but I wouldn't really put a lot of trust in a patch on a
>fairly new machine (You can't even buy them yet!) compared to a newly
>compiled program. How many ALPHA gurus can there be in the industry by now?
>And so what proportion of developers will be able to successfully make use
>of PATCH?

A newly-compiled program on Alpha is going to be just as buggy as a
newly-compiled program on VMS.  They'll both have bugs, and both will need
fixes, no matter if these fixes are delivered in the form of patches or new
images!

If your "stuff" is delivered in 1993 (instead of 1994), but didn't work, and
DEC had a fix, but couldn't send it to you except by next day air, I'm sure
you'd rather that Patch worked!

-Dan Wing, DWING@UH01.Colorado.EDU or WING_D@UCOLMCC.BITNET (DGW11)
 Systems Programmer, University Hospital, Denver