From: terry@spcvxb.spc.edu (Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr.)
Newsgroups: vmsnet.vms-posix
Subject: Re: name of VMS product has changed...
Date: 20 Aug 92 05:15:59 GMT
Organization: St. Peter's College, US

In article <1992Aug19.153401@mccall.com>, tp@mccall.com (Terry Poot) writes:
> I must have missed the "do not install Posix 1.0" letter. :-)

  I think there's an implicit "do not install" for anything that's V1.0 8-)

> Do you suppose that hyping it to the marketplace 6 months before it is ready
> might be putting pressure on developers to get it out early, rather than taking
> the time to make it work? As far as multi-platform support, it will certainly
> take more resources, but often times a bug will be uncovered on one platform
> that was latent on another. I'm not sure it intrinsically affects quality,
> except to the extent that it increases the pressure to skip the testing, because
> the developers are spread thinner. (So what does DEC do? Lay people off, of
> course.)

  I've said this before (and trust me, it hasn't made me many friends in VMS
Engineering), but I'll mention it again here:

  You can't test quality into a product - it needs to be in there from the
start. I know that DEC can produce some excellent software (sometimes even
in V1.0 products - eXcursion is a good example). DEC needs to spread the word
about successful development methods around the company.

  I think that part of the problem is that VMS folks deal with very small
pieces of the OS (of course there are exceptions: Andy, Kathy, Keith, etc.).
I once asked a VMS engineer what he did and his answer was "I support the
set characteristics subset function of the terminal class driver". I _think_
he was joking. When the number of interfaces doubles, the communication
squares.

  However, even FT isn't as successful as it should be. DEC seems to select
sites which match DEC's internal use of VMS (whatever that is - it doesn't
seem to include using BACKUP or LAT) [note: old comment - these problems seem
to be mostly fixed now]. Then there are the DEC Cooperative Marketing Part-
ners or whatever they're called this week - folks that let DEC sell their
software, like Joiner Software (Jnet). Those folks are only concerned with
making sure _their_ package didn't break. And then there are what I call the
"Uncooperative marketing partners" [that's a joke] like Executive Software.
ES is a VMS FT site. Somehow I don't think DEC asked them to do that out of
the goodness of DEC's heart - but there would be enough folks mad at _DEC_
if, say, Diskeeper didn't work on a new VMS release that it's a necessity
that they be a test site.

  When someone who does a thorough job happens to sneak in (and I spoke to
one such site which was _very_ disillusioned with the whole thing) the re-
ports of "BACKUP being completely unusable" were ignored because "if it was
a real problem one of the other sites would have reported it".

  I think the problem is that while the folks who write the code have pride
in their work, and they don't mind being told "gee, that's ugly code" every
now and again, they're so isolated that they never get the FT feedback, or
it's mangled so much they can't make sense of it.

  That's just a guess - I'm not, nor have I ever been, a VMS FT site. How-
ever, I have tested lots of other stuff for DEC in the past. RSTS/E V10.0
(since released) had a "Field Test panel" a few Symposia ago where the FT
sites reported experiences to the attendees (with DEC's blessing). One of
the comments I made there was that V10.0 was the first release to support
printing to LAT queues (like LATSYM with VMS). I reported a problem with it
crashing the system when started. I had a workaround for it in 15 minutes
and I had a patch which fixed it completely at the end of that day. Since 
then I have had _zero_ problems with the RSTS version (6 RSTS systems com-
peting for 8 printers with 6 VAX systems). Whenever a printer is stuck, it's
invariably the VMS symbiont that's wedged. How long has LATSYM been part of
VMS? V4.4? Earlier? And it still doesn't work properly?

  I'll close with a comment on timely SPR answers. I filed a SPR against
VMS V4.1, complaining that it didn't operated the TSV05 in high speed mode.
I got the usual "fixed in a future release". I forgot about it. Years (many)
went by. Well, guess what! It's fixed. In VMS V5.4-1. Amazing turnaround. It
was a missing register save.

	Terry Kennedy		Operations Manager, Academic Computing
	terry@spcvxa.bitnet	St. Peter's College, Jersey City, NJ USA
	terry@spcvxa.spc.edu	+1 201 915 9381
Newsgroups: vmsnet.vms-posix