This will be my last contribution to this thread, just to fix some
things.
Le 25 janv. 07 à 15:48, Ambrose Li a écrit :
I disagree completely. You obviously do not report bugs to open-
source projects.
Did I've made a mistake? I wanted to say that it cost nearly nothing
to correct a bug in free software. (double negative, mistakes, oups!)
My bugs mostly are very trivial things, but makes the OS look really
bad from a user's point of view---spelling mistakes, grammatical
problems, translation errors, and the like.
These are not bugs! A spelling mistake is certainly not a bug. What
is called a bug is a functional malfunction...
As to why Apple would apparently not care
about their own image in their handling of bugs---when their marketing
strategy seems to be entirely image-based---I cannot comprehend at
all.
Do you really mean that a spelling mistake discourage people using
Apple (or not) products ? For most people I don't think so. Even
serious bugs didn't discourage people using applications (provided
that they didn't crash at startup!)
For such trivial-to-fix-but-serious-in-the-users'-viewpoint bugs, I
also disagree that they should also get fixed only in the next
release. They should be fixed also in the current release, even one
previous release.
This is not always possible at a good price! Apple is a company, they
cannot always do that...
I also do not agree that open source projects give good bug feedback
because it is free (this is also very strange reasoning, IMHO).
I didn't say such a thing! But thinking about I agree provided that
"free" means "having the liberty to contribute"... I would have say
that in the "mass" of free programmers there is always somebody that
feel free to correct your bug, this is why free software model
works... But you need a critical-mass (Apple needs to pay that mass!).
They good bug feedback because they treat the bug reporter as a
peer (or at
least---in the case of the worse projects---a user that can help
them). That is, in a sense, open-source projects' bug reporting
procedures tell you that they treat you as a developer, and in
practice typically really treat you as a developer.
Is this serious to treat the reporter as a peer ??? End users are not
programmers/developers/etc! Ask somebody in the street...
With the bugreport.apple.com form it is the reverse: they claim to
treat you as a developer (because you need a developer account to sign
in), but they treat you worse than a (open-source) user; it is
naturally very easy to get very discouraged.
Can't you imagine the number of people which wanted to report a bug
each time they cannot open a non-existing file ? Yes, this is a good
strategy to discourage people to report bugs because most users
didn't know what a bug is, and when you are a company you cannot
spend your time (your money) to track such things. So doing this way,
you can hope that only developers may do reports, and then it is
reasonable to think about treating them as peers (only "thinking
about" because developers are sometimes just end-users).
I didn't know what is the X11 problem involved in this discussion,
but somebody suspected (I'm not sure this could be the case but...)
that an X11 application ask for 3Gb of memory to the X11 server which
answers NO and then crash. Ok this is a bug (functional one), but it
seems that this happens under very special conditions (I used X11 on
MacOSX without any major problems for years). So, do you really think
that Apple must correct such bug just because few people use an
application which need 3Gb of graphical memory to work ? They
certainly take it into account and balance the goods and the odds.
I'm not sure that Apple's consider X11 as a crucial component of
MacOSX. This is their politics whatever you and I think about it.
To close: I can tell you that Apple's reporting procedure is really
effective. It has been the case for me, so it works at least
sometimes. I am not defending Apple, but you cannot say that the
procedure is not effective just because they didn't (visibly) take
your request into account: it is possible that somebody else think
that your request is not interesting (the worse) or not having
priority (better but unsatisfactory too).
JB
PS: you can write me in private if you want. This is a very
interesting debate.
--
M. Jean-Baptiste Yunès http://www.liafa.jussieu.fr/~yunes/
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