as far as one can tell from outside Apple, all bugs just get
thrown into a black hole anyway. that doesn't exactly motivate me
to care about which submission method to use. submitting a bug
report seems to mean that i'll hear nothing for 18 months, at
which point something may or may not happen which may or may not
make a positive difference. which is probably true even if i don't
submit a bug.
I'm sorry to hear that that's been your experience. I can say
without hesitation that I've been fixing bugs literally as fast as
I can; but I can only fix the bugs that are submitted.
i don't doubt that people are doing their best, and i didn't mean to
disparage any of Apple's developers. i'm also aware of just how few
Java developers there are at Apple.
i do have a problem with the system, though. it's terrible. and
that's something that Apple's developers should try to fix, because
it reflects badly on you. Sun has never seen any of my money, yet
they give me far better support than Apple, who've seen plenty of it.
Java 6 -- builds of which i can already download and try out, for
free, without so much as registering my interest -- uses native code
to render the GTK look and feel. Apple's advantage there is about to
be eroded. how else is Apple's Java better?
you said:
as "statistical" reports once they reach a certain threshold.
Because they are treated statistically, it is difficult for
engineers to communicate with end users/developers about the bug
(such as "try this workaround" or "can you explain this bit" or " I
can't reproduce, can you tell us more about your setup").
but engineers *don't* communicate via the bug reporter. at least not
in my experience. i haven't even seen any fields in which they could
do so.
Sun don't guarantee any communication, but their public bug database
and the comments their developers sometimes make there are a great
deal more informative and useful than anything i've seen Apple offer.
they even have internally-raised defects visible. and when engineers
don't comment or suggest work-arounds, other developers can. in a
case like my Robot.createScreenCapture crash, i can submit a bug
*and* warn other developers *and* tell other developers about my work-
around, all at the same time --- but only if it's a Sun problem
rather than an Apple one.
things are especially bad in the common case where a defect is marked
as a duplicate. if you didn't submit the original, that's it:
complete silence from then on.
and of course, you can't search for duplicates beforehand.
did i mention that Sun will even let me see the source if i'm
prepared to accept their terms?
Bugs are fixed according to their importance (mitigated by risk,
obviously). I understand that it's frustrating that your specific
bugs weren't fixed during a particular release (or at all), but
it's likely that there were more important bugs to fix in the
timeframe given.
but this is another problem with the lack of insight we get. we don't
even get an idea of what was fixed after the fact from the release
notes. reading
i count 6 RFE bugs fixed, and 32 defect bugs fixed. which would be
pathetic *if* that represented all that had been done.
so i have this crashing bug with Robot.createScreenCapture. i can't
see if it's already fixed. i can't see if it's already known about.
the only thing i know won't be a waste of my time is to post to java-
dev for other developers to see.
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