### ACE+TAO Bug Fixing Process

As ACE and TAO have grown in popularity the volume of mail on the ACE 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 Center research group at Washington University 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.

Therefore, in order for us to continue supporting ACE and TAO effectively and to allow the ACE and TAO user community to evolve, we are instituting the following policies:

- All bug reports that are submitted using the appropriate bug report form in $ACE_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM or $TAO_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM will be given a tracking number and entered into a database (which will soon be available for public viewing on the Web, like the rest of our documentation and source). Please use these forms since bug reports that are not submitted in this form are likely to fall through the cracks.

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

- If it's a bug report along with a fix we will also apply this in a timely manner.

- If it's a bug report that will prevent ACE or TAO from working on a major platform used by our sponsors we will fix it in a timely manner, as well.

- If it's a bug report that doesn't fall into the preceding category we will treat it like all other bug reports and assign it a tracking number and enter this into our bug report database for future processing. We will try to address this bug as time permits. If you'd like an immediate response, please contact me about becoming a sponsor or contact Riverace or OCI for commercial support of ACE or TAO, respectively.

  We encourage bug reports for those without support to be posted initially to the ACE users mailing list at ace-users@cs.wustl.edu 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 will continue to participate in this mailing list we can not guarantee immediate response to all postings.

- 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 require consulting support for ACE and/or TAO, please contact Riverace or OCI, as well.

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.

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