bug report etiquette

[Chris Torek]

In article <10110 at ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> ggs at ulysses.homer.nj.att.com
(Griff Smith) writes:
>If [I] had looked in your archives of comp.bugs.4bsd you would have
>found the report of this "nice bug"; I sent it to Berkeley on August
>11, 1987 and also filed to netnews.

Unfortunately, my archives (such as they are) are on those tapes we
have been having trouble reading.  You did indeed post such a fix;
I found it elsewhere since.  And as you mention, that bug was introduced
at Berkeley by A. Nonymous anyway.

[much deleted; see the previous article]

>It would have been an act of simple courtesy to have asked me in
>private communication first.

(That presupposes I would know where to ask.)

>...  I particularly resent having my sentence "I posted
>fixes to comp.bugs.4bsd for the bugs that I found" removed from the
>above followup to my followup.  This twisted the reply to say "your
>driver does too have bugs - look at this juicy one".

I did not mean to do that.  (For that matter, I know of no one who
uses cooked /dev/mt devices anyway.  Without a way to set the block
size, and given the repositioning error on 9 track tapes, what good
*are* block tape devices?  They make terrible disk drives.  Hence a
bug in the block code is hardly juicy.)

At any rate, to get to the point (yes, there is one here), I had
actually intended my previous followup as an apology.  I just like
having the last word :-) and was not careful about the wording of
said words.  Consider this another attempt.

By the way, we have concluded that the problem is in hardware.  A
handy nearby 6250 bpi drive is now successfully reading those tapes,
and we have a call in to DEC to get the TU78 fixed.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Computer Science, +1 301 454 7163
(hiding out on trantor.umd.edu until mimsy is reassembled in its new home)
Domain: chris at mimsy.umd.edu		Path: not easily reachable