Re: Does beta software crash?

[Hans Reiser <reiser@ricochet.net>]

Have you ever made minor tweaks to a kernel? :-)

All you need to do is step on one little byte that you shouldn't have
stepped on, which you can do with the most trivial of changes involving,
say, writing past the end of an array, which you may well have done
while adding code intended to be a bug fix of a less dramatic bug.

It is the bugs in the shipping product that deserve being infuriated
over.  Windows 95 crashes a lot.  That is ridiculous.  A beta of 98
crashing is just something to ignore.

Hans

Gene Gaines wrote:
> 
> Hans,
> 
> I apologize.  I intended no criticism of you.
> 
> What infuriates me is the mindset we all seem to slip into.
> 
> But fact is that a proper operating system, built on solid
> underpinnings, _would_not_crash_ at this point in its
> development.
> 
> I can accept that late minor tweaks can cause instability,
> but blue screen system crash?  Not unless you have made your
> tweak on top of a house of cards.
> 
> Enough.  I'll get back to constructive work.
> 
> Gene Gaines
> ggaines@generation.net
> 
> Hans Reiser wrote:
> 
> > Developers ship beta software when they think it won't crash but want
> > somebody other than them to test it to see if it does.  As for the
> > notion that minor tweaks are all that get added after a beta ship, all I
> > can say is that minor tweaks cause lots of crashes.
> >
> > You folks are being extremist.  Criticize their crashes after they ship
> > FCS.  It will still crash then.  That is the important difference
> > between them and Sun.  Save the flames for later.
> >
> > Hans
> >
> > Gene Gaines wrote:
> > >
> > > Quoting from an email to this list on 20 April 1998 20:44:15 -0400 (EDT)
> > >
> > >  "Oh come on, expecting beta software to not crash is pretty silly.
> > >  If it didn't crash they would ship it now.
> > >
> > >   Hans"
> > >
> > > I am infuriated by this.
> > >
> > > Hans, you have been badly misled.
> > >
> > > If the professionals working in our field (computing / information
> > > technology) have been so incompetent, so short-sighted or so
> > > self-serving as to permit ANY user of computers to feel this way,
> > > then they have permitted their field to slide into bad very times.
> > >
> > > Gene Gaines
> > > ggaines@generation.net