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Ah yes, IRIX. My biggest recollection of it was being annoyed that they had a bug in updating the utmp file correctly, so that it would sometimes leave users i

Ah yes, IRIX. My biggest recollection of it was being annoyed that they had a bug in updating the utmp file correctly, so that it would sometimes leave users in it that were no longer logged in the system. I wrote a quick and dirty cron job hack that would compare the utmp to the wtmp entries once a minute and delete any stale users it found, and I posted it to usenet for anybody else annoyed by the issue. I was surprised a while later to see that rather than fixing the bug, SGI employees were recommending people install my dirty little hack.

Mountain_Skies 11mo ago
Wonder what internal process at SGI made it less acceptable to fix the defect than to resort to relying on a community developed workaround. They were expensive, premium machines. Seems like image alone would be reason enough to fix something once it got to the level of someone from the outside developing a workaround.
- pm215 11mo ago
  My guess would be that it's a split between employees in support (where being helpful to the customer is the aim and suggesting workarounds is part of the job) vs development (where it was almost certainly acknowledged as a bug but had to be weighed up against every other bug and feature for priority). Bugs with known workarounds which only affect a small slice of users are often not fixed very quickly.