RE: Revisiting NSTextView bugs in Interface Builder (rant about B ugRe porter)
RE: Revisiting NSTextView bugs in Interface Builder (rant about B ugRe porter)
- Subject: RE: Revisiting NSTextView bugs in Interface Builder (rant about B ugRe porter)
- From: Jeff Laing <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 16:36:11 +1100
I really don't want to dissect Apple's bug reporting system - I just want to
complain about it ;-)
> - Even if Apple thinks they have fixed a bug, they don't know for sure
until
> after extensive testing and possibly after verification of the fix or work
> around by customers. Therefore they can't tell other customers anything
> definitive until the hear back from people who don't
> necessarily work to Apple's schedules. That means Apple can't even say
> when they can say something definitive.
Round here, that means you don't *close* the bug - closure of a bug implies
that it is resolved, one way or another even if the resolution is "dammit,
we can't fix this ever, its broken by design".
Thats the nub of my complaint - I interpret "Closed" as meaning "This will
never be looked at again" but gives no indication whatsoever on whether I
should just stall development until till March (July? (October?)), or ditch
the buggy setup and go with something else.
I'm *not* on a strict timetable, I believe I could ignore it till XCode2.0,
if I had any confidence that that would fix it. But I'd be annoyed if I
waited, then discovered that no, its still bust.
(There are two approaches I can take and they're both a lot harder than just
dragging a widget in IB so I'm hesitant to start - I want custom classes
because I want additional instance variables - but you can't set the initial
font without initial text content, so I'd need to have some sort of
post-setup that fixed the font in each of the controls, rather than just
rely on the nib content. Or I can build a super-control (and presumably
palette) which would create the three custom NSTextView subclasses itself.
I don't know which is easier... The latter needs more work in terms of
managing layout of the subcontrols when the window is resized, but it fits
the model better in that there is only really one set of data that is being
displayed in each of the controls)
> - Apple may receive hundreds of bug reports per day, and the
> engineering
> time needed to identify duplicates at all is so large that
> there is no time
> to compose lucid explanations for a customer's benefit and vet the
> explanation through the necessary QA and or legal analysis
> needed before
> delivery to a customer.
I didn't ask for a lucid explanation - again, around here, you just need to
say:
"This is a known bug. For more info, see bug report 1234567"
if the customer has access to that bug report. If its been fixed, or the
customer doesn't have access to 1234567, you cut/paste the salient
resolution information from the original defect which can quite legitimately
include "Believed fixed, no indication at present of release date" - we do
that all the time. Customers with deep pockets can get us to be more
forthcoming, because they get to drive (to a certain extent) our delivery
schedules.
> I also work with an institutionalized bug tracking database,
> and we also do not expose our dirty laundry to customers by making it
widely
> available.
Ditto.
Remember, my original problem here was something that CORRUPTED my nibs over
and over, and yet no-one on the various mailing lists could replicate it.
I'd have been dancing with joy if Apple'd just said "yes, its really a bug"
- I'd have saved myself a fair few nights of debugging, and reconstructing
the same old nib object connections over and over.
This just echoes a previous beef that I've ranted about over in the xcode
list, that the Interface Builder hides too damn much away under pretty
widgets and you really can't tell whether you've broken something by feeding
it bad input, or that you've tripped over a bug in the toolchain. I freely
admit that I'm a beginner at Cocoa, and using Interface Builder. I'd like
to get better at it - but when I tried to do something new, the floor fell
out from under me in a way that no-one else recognised (except some guy at
Apple who recognised the bug as a duplicate, but clearly doesn't hang around
on this list).
Sigh, ranting so much that even *Ive* stopped listening. Move along folks,
nothing more to see here...
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