From lanl!hc!lll-winken!uunet!ibmpa!bullhead!brunner Mon Jul 24 15:18:54 EDT 1989 Article 961 of comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt: Path: cmcl2!lanl!hc!lll-winken!uunet!ibmpa!bullhead!brunner >From: brunner@bullhead.uucp Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt Subject: Distribution of IBM/4.3 fixes (technical advisory) Summary: Note to IBM/4.3 technical contacts (site support) Keywords: V1.2 Message-ID: <1493@ibmpa.UUCP> Date: 21 Jul 89 17:48:02 GMT Sender: news@ibmpa.UUCP Reply-To: brunner@ibmsupt.UUCP (Thomas Eric Brunner) Organization: IBM AWD Palo Alto Lines: 143 The following letter will soon be received by the technical contact at each IBM/4.3 licensed site. It concerns a change in the organization of fixes which may be applied to IBM/4.3. The change it refers to has been described in a posting to this newsgroup. This note is Volume 1, number 2 (V1.2). Eric Brunner =================================================================== IBM Advanced Workstation Division 1510 Page Mill Road M/S 35A Palo Alto, CA 94304 Dear Colleague, A revision to the organization of the on-line support for IBM/4.3 at IBM Palo Alto has commenced this month. This note describes the changes that have been made so that sites which make use of on-line support can continue to apply bug fixes to their release. The change discussed in this memo is motivated by a desire to improve the quality of support offered to IBM/4.3 customers. IBM/4.3 is a PRPQ product in source form. It is comprised of major sub-systems which are under development within the research community, and for which exchanges of fixes and enhancements in source form is the prevalent prac- tice. Examples subsystems are the Andrew File System (CMU), the X11 window system (MIT), and the Berkeley release of the operating system and utilities. Prior to this month, fixes to the product were organ- ized only within the notes-based APAR bug reporting and tracking system. As several APARs are duplicates or varia- tions on common problems, (e.g., those APARs concerning the asychronous line driver), this form of publishing fixes occasionally requires extensive interactive traversal of the notesfiles to obtain a fix. In order to improve con- sistency, we are reorganizing the structure and format of fixes. Fixes to IBM/4.3 are now sequentially numbered within a volume, and to the greatest extent possible, the format of each fix is a forward context diff, suitable for multi-file and multi-directory automatic installation via the patch program. The fixes are all located on IBMSUPT as individual files within a subdirectory of the publically readable UUCP spool directory (/usr/spool/uucppublic/ibm43-fixes). The names of each file correspond to the volume and sequence number of the fix, e.g., V1.n is the nth-fix published within Volume 1. In addition to the fixes, a compressed tar image of the patch program sources is kept (patch.tar.Z) in this subdirectory for the benefit of sites which do not already have this useful program. Our intent is to mimic the well-known organization and format of "official" fixes to Berkeley's 4bsd release, pub- lished via a moderated newsgroup (comp.bugs.4bsd.ucb-fixes) and archived at UUNET. Each fix to IBM/4.3 will be July 17, 1989 - 2 - published via the un-moderated newsgroup specific to the IBM RT (comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt), and archived on IBMSUPT as described in the preceding paragraph. The new naming con- vention and the selection of patch-compatible context differences follows the format adopted by Berkeley in March 1987. An index of fixes will be maintained and published regularly, and again, the Berkeley practice will be fol- lowed. This change improves upon the somewhat variable loca- tion and naming conventions, in which occasional fixes referred to within the notes-based APAR system were not con- tained within a notesfile but were located in the publically readable uucp spool directory (/usr/spool/uucppublic) on the IBMSUPT machine, (e.g., the "hammerfix"). This change also makes consistent the format for diffs, though non-context diffs were predominant, the direction of the diffs was not consistent throughout. This lack of con- sistency made the fixes unsuited to automatic installation or management. Finally, this change makes bug tracking and fix instal- lation much easier to manage, and aids understanding of pos- sible interdependencies of fixes. The extensive interactive traversal of notesfiles for clues or later but apparently unrelated notes is made unnecessary. No change has been introduced to the system for open- ing, tracking and closure of APARs. Some fixes may continue to be introduced into the notesfiles, but the authoritative fix will be as described above, and each APAR closure will contain a reference to the Volume and sequence number of the relevant fix. We anticipate that the application of bug fixes will be made simpler for IBM's customers, and tracking fix installa- tions will be made easier for the on-site support staff, the ACSC support staff, and the IBM/4.3 support programmers at IBM Palo Alto Sincerely, IBM/4.3 Technical Support Staff Palo Alto 13 July, 1989 July 17, 1989 Eric Brunner uunet!ibmsupt!brunner