Establishing a relatively high-quality, comprehensive, public known-bugs database, meant to be consulted by users to steer clear of trouble and by NeXT for debugging NeXTSTEP. NeXT should really maintain such a file itself, but they don't. The advantages are nevertheless very clear: users don't have to assemble bits of material from here and there, they don't have to generate reports about topics already discovered by someone else, they don't have to stumble over bugs that have already been discovered, the debuggers don't have to filter out superfluous material. An attempt has been made to formulate things concisely; further information can be found in the sources indicated.
Problems:
* A particular bug has a life span that begins on one NS release (possibly unknown) and ends on another, while users may be interested only in particular NS releases. The end of a bug's lifespan is particularly troublesome: if the submitters don't revoke it it has to be marked as possibly still applying.
* This file is published is several versions, and reports may change between them to refine the bug, add evidence, a workaround, or revoke the report as erroneous. How much of these changes must be highlighted?
* How to mark particular items such that they can be recovered in another release of this collection, and yet be found as belonging to a particular NS release? It would be helpful if Edit allowed a search for regular expressions, but...
* The sheer size of it all.
Coverage
The following is limited to the NeXTSTEP_3.0 CD-ROM distribution, and excludes facts included in /NextLibrary/Documentation/ReleaseNotes.
A selection of bugs known to me (almost all, really), and not already included in the ReleaseNotes.
A selection of suggestions I want to make (many, but far from all), sort of compensation for maintaining this file...
A selection of ``refereed'' reproducible bugs reported to me (indicated are: who discovered (by default the reporter), who reported, who verified).
Notices of fixes by NeXT's programmers wanted (come on!).
Some rumours and input from other sources (indicated as such).
This file incorporates all my reports to Bug_NeXT(ec) that are still valid (i.e., 1358, 1446, 1897 (not second item: cured), 1899, 2028, 2064, 2100, 2101 on Bug_NeXTec, none on Bug_NeXT) and replaces various submissions (among them earlier versions of this compilation).
No information about any beta release: a non-disclosure agreement is involved and I want to include the names of the people who provided the information, so that it can be checked by anyone who wants to do that.
