>i think it's not so dangerous as you described it. i've just checked the
>'old' vers9011  BITEARN NODES  and it  has most  of the  above mentioned
>errors too  (i haven't looked into  my archives when this  error occured
>first).
 
You are  right. I get  my BITEARN NODES  directly from my  NETSERV, which
means I had  no online copy of  the previous versions that  I could check
and,  in fact,  it had  not occured  to me  that the  problem might  have
already existed. As I  said 1.6e does not detect it, so  we can well have
been running  this way for a  long time. Anyway  I'm glad to hear  we can
relax and not have to worry every hour about what might happen because of
this problem. That doesn't mean I'm happy about what happened, of course.
 
>of course you are  right pointing to this error. i  will asap update the
>VERNODES EXEC to check  for this too. on the other hand  we can never be
>sure, to have 100% correct data (i'm  telling this for years now). in my
>opinion tools, servers  etc. must be stable enough to  deal with 'minor'
>errors like this one (and in  fact -as described above- they have dealed
>with this error).
 
I don't agree. There  is NO WAY I am going to  spend both programming and
CPU time  ensuring that everything  will work  fine if links  are defined
several times, or only in one direction.  One thing is to write code that
will not crash  with slightly incorrect input, another thing  is to waste
inordinate amounts of time writing code that will work normally with such
errors. You know better than anyone how much time your verification tools
take to  perform sanity checks on  BITEARN NODES, and still,  errors slip
through  undetected. It  is not  reasonable to  expect that  applications
using BITEARN NODES have to perform  even more extensive checks, and that
is why I  have suggested that major applications should  be tested before
BITEARN NODES  is released (I  understand you don't  have the time  to do
that, this is not a complaint about your work, just wishful thinking).
 
Followup to NODMGT-L only.
 
  Eric