Re: Bug reports and documentation updates
Re: Bug reports and documentation updates
- Subject: Re: Bug reports and documentation updates
- From: Wade Tregaskis <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 13:45:07 +1000
And don't spend more than 10 minutes either because if you spend hours
or days working down to the essence of the bug and provide a small
working application that demonstrates the bug and can explain to Apple
exactly what is wrong, it doesn't do any good! You cant attach such
information to a bug report and you will never hear from Apple again.
They won't reliably tell you the status of your bug or if they have
any intention of confirming it let alone fixing it. The bug will
either get fixed in a later release leaving you to wonder if your
effort helped at all or it won't get fixed and you will know your
effort didn't help.
In my experience, submitting bugs to Apple is a waste of valuable time
and an exercise in frustration and futility. Let them find and fix
their own damn bugs if they can't exert themselves enough to even
confirm a bugs existence. If you desperately need a fix and can show
Apple exactly what is wrong in a concise way, the incredible wall of
silence that results is even more frustrating. Just don't waste your
time.
Good to see I'm not the only one with such sentiments - I'm sure
there's a large group with similar feelings, staying silent to avoid
the inevitable "it must be your fault bug reporter sucks" response.
If someone were being paid [by Apple] for their time to work on bug
reports & documentation updates, I'm sure they'd get at least some
attention (money talks). Plus, if they worked for Apple proper (as
opposed to an outside 'consultant') they would be able to discuss
problems with Apple developers that people outside don't get privy to
(like Panther stuff). Again, they'd save Apple's own developers time -
when a bug is fixed, this person or persons could handle all the
developer relations required to communicate the solution (or future
release of).
Although the rumour mill suggests Apple's developer relations
department has the belt pulled pretty tight right now. But, that's
just all the more reason to reinaugerate the evangelist department and
take advantage of free (or at least cheap) labour.
Perhaps Apple's policy on updates needs to be revised. There must be
some very severe limits on what Apple's developers can put into
updates, to judge from the extreme lack of bug fixes. And why can't
Apple release non-priority updates as they're developed? Being able to
say "go grab the 50k fix for XXXX from Software Update" is way
preferable to "go pay $250 for the next major release, in 6 months, if
it's shipped on time". Granted, no-one wants to end up in a Windows
world where every morning you're greeted by another 25 "critical"
updates, all 5 meg each, but at least if those updates are available
you can solve problems right now if you need to.
Example, since Apple likes real-world cases for things like this: keys
created by the CDSA leave out any validity dates you provide, which is
of course a pain in the butt (you can of course just set them yourself
manually after creating the keys, but that'll sooner or later become
obsolete code). This is a known bug, which the CDSA guys have
acknowledged. I'm sure they've already fixed it - it's a simple one,
and they're good chaps. But even though I must have mentioned that
months ago now, there's still no patch. Maybe it'll be fixed in
Panther - great! But the problem exists now.
In fact, in this case I didn't even submit a bug report, but someone on
the Security team picked it up off the mailing list. In a single
sentence they confirmed the bug, said it would be fixed asap, and
thanked me for noticing it. That's more feedback than I've received
*in total* from my dozens of bug reporter submits. And I never get
thanked for those submits.
If only they could then release that fix.
Wade Tregaskis
-- Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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