Re: Bug reports and documentation updates
Re: Bug reports and documentation updates
- Subject: Re: Bug reports and documentation updates
- From: Stéphane Sudre <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 10:33:13 +0200
On mercredi, juillet 23, 2003, at 05:45 AM, Wade Tregaskis wrote:
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).
This is not a good solution because the person might not be able to
reproduce the problem on its machine, it will not provide a contact for
devbugs and it would be quite difficult for the person to determine
whether a bug is really a bug or just a problem on the user side.
I can understand the frustration one can get when dealing with the bug
reporting process (the problem I really find stupid currently is that
you can't file bug reports using Safari) but I do not agree that
you're not thanked. With every confirmation mail, there's this generic
sentence thanking the developer and indicating that the submission is
appreciated by Apple.
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.
To come back to the topic of this mailing-list, what would be nice from
a Cocoa point of view is that AppKit and Foundation Kit bug fixes are
more often put into the minor updates and all the bugs fixed are listed
(this is not the case currently).
--
Stephane
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