### ACE+TAO Bug Fixing Policies

As ACE,and TAO have grown in popularity the volume of mail on the ACE+TAO users mailing list and USENET newsgroup comp.soft-sys.ace has grown considerably. While this increase is healthy, and a natural consequence of the larger number of ACE and TAO users, it is straining the resources of the DOC research group at Washington University, UC Irvine and ISIS to respond to all the traffic immediately. Moreover, our prompt bug fixes may actually be discouraging the creation of a larger community of users who have deep knowledge of how ACE and TAO work and can help provide bug fixes and new features.

For us to continue supporting ACE and TAO effectively and to allow the ACE and TAO user community to evolve, please make it a point to abide by the following policies:

- All bug reports to the ACE+TAO mailing lists should be submitted using the appropriate bug report form in $ACE_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM (for ACE) or $TAO_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM (for TAO). Please use these forms since bug reports that are not submitted in this form are likely to fall through the cracks. Here is our policy for addressing these bug reports:

  1. If a report is from someone sponsoring our work we will respond to it in a very timely manner. Please contact me if you'd like to become a sponsor.

  2. If it's a bug report along with a fix we will also apply this in a timely manner. In general, people who submit good bug reports with fixes tend to get much better help from the core DOC group team, irrespective of whether they are sponsors or not since they are helping our overall effort move ahead.

  3. If it's a bug report that will prevent ACE or TAO from working on a major platform used by our sponsors we'll try to fix it as time permits.

- You should also consider entering your bug report into our bug tracking database so that it's archived for future processing. We try to address these bugs as time permits, but may not get to them for a while unless it affects our work or the work of our sponsors. If you'd like an immediate response, please contact me about becoming a sponsor or contact one of the companies that provides commercial support for ACE+TAO.

  We encourage bug reports for those without support to be posted initially to the ACE users (ace-users@cs.wustl.edu) or TAO users (tao-users@cs.wustl.edu) mailing lists, where the ACE+TAO user community may already have developed, or have an interest in developing, a solution. While the core ACE+TAO development team participates in this mailing list, we can not guarantee responses to all postings.

- If you post something and don't get a reply, please do the following:

  - Check to see whether your posting made it to the list, which you can see by checking out the comp.soft-sys.ace newsgroup to see if your posting is visible.

  - If it's not visible, please make sure you're subscribed to the mailing list(s) you sent the report to since we have a "members only" posting requirement to minimize spam.

  - If it is visible and you haven't received a reply this probably means that either no one knows the answer or no one has time to answer it. As always, if you need more predictable help please contact one of commercial support companies for ACE+TAO.

- If you find a problem with a version of TAO that was released by OCI then please report it to taosupport@ociweb.com since their version of TAO is somewhat different from the DOC group's version of TAO and thus they provide their own support.

- If it's a general question about how to use ACE or TAO feature we'll try to respond as time permits, though we will also rely on the experience of the ACE and TAO user community to field these types of questions, as well. If you have a question about TAO, you should first check out the TAO online FAQ to see if your question has already been answered. If you require consulting support for ACE and/or TAO, please contact one of the companies that provides commercial support for ACE+TAO.

Naturally, we encourage other ACE+TAO users to continue to help provide fixes and advice in response to postings on the ACE and TAO mailing list. If you have a patch that fixes a problem you've found with our software here's the process for submitting it:

1. Use the latest version of the ACE, i.e., what's available from

   http://cvs.doc.wustl.edu/

2. Create a ``unified diff'' and put this into Bugzilla at

   http://deuce.doc.wustl.edu/bugzilla/index.cgi

   and send an email to the ACE mailing list or comp.soft-sys.ace newsgroup summarizing what the problem was and you've done to fix the problem, i.e., use the ChangeLog format.

3. Ideally, you could also create (or augment) a test program that validates your patch and integrate it into the ACE_ROOT/tests directory.

Please be sensitive to the fact that the core team is very busy so we simply don't have time to address problems reported by non-sponsors.

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