> Date:          Wed, 19 Nov 1997 09:18:38 -0800
> From:          Friedrich Harasleben <[log in to unmask]>
> Organization:  Oesterreichische Kreditversicherungs AG
> To:            [log in to unmask]
> Cc:            [log in to unmask]
> Subject:       Re: Stage/iX feedback URGENTLY needed.


[stuff deleted]

> - but STAGE/iX the aborted with an error (could not find it in my memos anymore)
Actually what happened (I think) was that Stage/iX returned an error
to Patch/iX. However, Patch/iX was not expecting that specific error
(for reasons noted below), so it displayed the error as a "generic"
Stag/iX problem and told the user to look at the file
STAGELOG.INSTALL.SYS for more detailed information. When the customer
looked in that file, he/she should have seen the exact cause of the
problem (which was Patch/iX was telling Stage/iX to validate the
staging area before it was marked as being "complete" -- see below).

In this case, I think the error handling worked reasonbly well
because...

> - the RC's helped me immedately around and I was told that the problem which caused the
>   abort is already know and will be addressed in the new release
> - What we had to do to finalize was (what ever it means in detail)
>   :RUN STAGEMAN.PUB.SYS
>   STAGEMAN > expert on
>   STAGEMAN $ complete stage_area
>              validate stage_area
>              exit

This was a problem in the initial release of Patch/iX. As I stated in
an earlier message, Patch/iX runs Stage/iX in expert mode to create
the staging area and stag all of the patched files in the staging
area.

One of the beta testers of Patch/iX and Stage/iX found a problem
(when doing some maliticious testing) that if you abort Patch/iX in
the middle of creating a staging area you would have an incomplete
staging area (one that did not contain all of the necessary files).
However, if you then went into STAGEMAN and typed "validate",
STAGEMAN would go ahead and validate the staging area because it had
no way of determining that the staging area was incomplete.

To fix this problem we added a command, "complete" that is issueed by
Patch/iX when it is finished putting files into the staging area. If
you try to "validate" the staging area before this command is issued
then STAGEMAN will complain that the staging area is not complete.

Unfortunately, the fix to Patch/iX to issue the "complete" command
somehow got dropped when some other unrelated bugs were fixed in
Patch/iX (a regression problem). As a result, when customer first
started using Patch/iX with Stage/iX on Release 5.0 they ran into the
"old" problem. This was fixed very quickly by the folks in CSY
Bangalore.

The workaround described above was used until the new vesion of
Patch/iX was available.


                                 Scott McClellan
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