From: olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson)
Subject: Re: IRIX 4.0.[2-5] summaries?
Organization:  Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 92 03:34:32 GMT

In <1992Apr16.113620.19014@helios.physics.utoronto.ca> sysmark@helios.physics.utoronto.ca (Mark Bartelt) writes:

| In past months, there have been some discussions about SGI's annoying
| (at least *I* find it annoying!) policy with regard to minor releases,
| and who gets them.  As I understand things, SGI will send one of these
| updates *only* to customers (covered by maintenance agreements) who've
| either
| 	explicitly requested that it be sent
| or
| 	reported a problem (to the TAC) which is fixed by the
| 	new release.
| 
| I recall hearing that 4.0.2 provides support for the new Indigo graphics
| hardware, and also that 4.0.3 addresses the problems with colormaps on PIs
| with eight-bit colour.  But there have been references to 4.0.4 here, and
| 4.0.5 appears to be just around the corner.

4.0.2, 4.0.3, and 4.0.4 are hardware specific releases (and did not
receive full testing on other hardware).  In a *few* specific
cases, customers were sent one or more of these 3 releases for other
systems to fix a bug.  At this time, it appears that 4.0.5 will be
a fix on fail release (that is, it still won't ship to everybody on
support automatically).

Thus, except for a few rare cases, 4.0.2 will be found only on
systems with Elan graphics (4D/30,35, and Indigo), and 4.0.3 and
4.0.4 on Crimson.

| Would it be possible for one of the SGI folks to post a summary of which
| bugs are fixed by each of these releases, so that we can know whether or
| not we should ask for a copy?

Not really.  Some are in the release notes, but since these were not
really intended as bug fix releases for general use, it may not be
complete.  The TAC may be able to get copies of the release notes
for you.  Since they aren't for general release, I don't know what
the policy would be as regards giving the release notes out.

| As I (and others) have pointed out before, many of us often don't bother
| reporting a bug to the TAC if we know that someone else has done so.  It
| would be a waste of our time, and yours.  But it would be nice to know
| which (if any) of the 4.0.[2-5] releases I should ask you for.

Only 4.0.5, unless you have a critical problem.

| For that matter, release dates would be useful as well.  It appears that
| some of your customers have 4.0.4 already; is this the "official" 4.0.4
| release, or a beta version?  The reason I ask is that I did log a call
| with the hotline asking for 4.0.3, and it hasn't arrived yet.  When did
| these various updates first start shipping, and how long does it take to
| get them to everyone who's on the distribution list?

4.0.4 has MR'ed.  4.0.5 is scheduled internally, but the dates aren't
firm yet.  4.0.4 was a patch release for 4.0.3 to fix or workaround
some more R4000 bugs (primarily in the 2.1 rev, I think), and one
specific graphics ucode bug for Elan; there were very few changes
from 4.0.3 to 4.0.4; 4.0.3 is obsolete as soon as 4.0.4 ships (to
Crimson customers only, plus perhaps a few Elan customers).

Of course, everything I've said above is my understanding and/or
opinion, not an official statement, etc., etc.  I'm not privy
to all the policy making, so even if I thought I understood something
when I wrote this, I might be wrong tomorrow!
--
Let no one tell me that silence gives consent,  |   Dave Olson
because whoever is silent dissents.             |   Silicon Graphics, Inc.
    Maria Isabel Barreno                        |   olson@sgi.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi