[TUHS] Has this been discussed on-list? How Unix changed Software.

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Sep 08, 2022 at 07:27:26AM +1000, Steve Jenkin wrote:
> Would your folk ship code with a list of outstanding bug reports?

Absolutely, there were always open bug reports that couldn't be
reproduced, or were a side effect of misusing the product, etc.

We didn't ship with stuff that we thought should be fixed and could
be fixed.

> I don???t think Ken & Dennis did that.

I wasn't there but it's hard to imagine anything as complex as an
operating system went out the door with everything fixed.  I dunno
how the kernel was done back in the day, but for us, doing a release
was a 6 month process.  If you reset that process each time a new
bug comes in, you'll never ship.  At some point, you have to balance
the set of features and bugfixes you can fix against whatever new
thing that shows up.  It's definitely an art to get that right.