Re: OT: How to file a radar
Re: OT: How to file a radar
- Subject: Re: OT: How to file a radar
- From: Laurence Harris <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 05:18:58 -0400
On Jul 19, 2006, at 2:50 PM, David Masover wrote:
Laurence Harris wrote:
But don't you think it is a little bit cumbersome compare to a
post like this?
Yes, but that's irrelevant.
No it's not. My God...
It doesn't matter how easy it is to talk about a bug here because
this is not viable as a formal bug reporting and feature request
mechanism for a company like Apple that gets nearly a thousand Radar
entries a day and employees hundreds of engineers. They need a much
more formal mechanism, even if it does require more effort from us.
Hence it's irrelevant that this is easier.
I don't know how difficult or easy it is to submit bugs via Radar.
There are two aspects of filing a bug in Radar that make it different
than talking about it here:
- You have to go to a web page, log in, and click a link to go to a
page where you report the problem. This part is not significantly
more trouble than creating a new e-mail you would use to post a
message to a mailing list.
- Here's the part that make it more work: Radar forces you to provide
certain kinds of information. You have to give it a title, specify
the relevant area (Mac OS X, documentation, developer tools, and so
on), tell how consistent it is, and other things people don't usually
put in a list posting, as well as provide a system profile for bugs.
In other words, Radar wants you to file an honest-to-goodness bug
report containing as much information as possible so an appropriate
engineer can be assigned to it and have a chance of reproducing it
and identifying the source of the problem. The main reason it's
easier to "report" a bug in a post to a mailing list is that most of
those posts tend to be less complete, often vague, and would be
correspondingly less useful to someone trying to track down the
problem. If you really provided a good, complete, detailed
description of a bug in a post to a mailing list it would be little
or no more trouble to submit it as a Radar.
But remember, most users would rather work around the bug than
report it, because reporting it is more work in the short run.
If you haven't done it, don't judge. IMO, the main reason people work
around bugs without reporting them is that in the vast majority of
cases a fix -- assuming it even happens -- isn't going to come in
time to save you from having to work around the bug anyway. In rare
situations you really need a fix to ship your product, but it's far
more often the case that you can't afford to sit on your product
waiting for Apple to fix a bug. Many times fixes don't show up until
the next major release. If you've filed a lot of bugs over the past
year or two you'll probably get a bunch of e-mails from devbugs
telling you some of them have been fixed in Leopard once Leopard is
available as a seed. But if you reported a bug six months ago, what
are the chances you can afford to require Leopard as your product's
minimum operating system? And that's assuming the bug is fixed in
Leopard. What if it isn't? Are you willing to sit around twiddling
your thumbs for six months or more hoping Apple will fix your bug so
you can finish your product? Such an approach would be foolish indeed.
In most cases I file bugs so other developers won't have to work
around them in the future, and then I implement a workaround.
Larry
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Xcode-users mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden