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Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

lapcatsoftware.com

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Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#131

Post by xmprt »

afdbcreid wrote: post #109
masklinn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. Or with open source projects. Fucking stalebot.

As an open source maintainer, I feel that statement is really unfair. Yes, we do sometimes close bug reports without evidence they are fixed. But: - We owe you nothing! And the fact that people still expect maintainers to work for them is really sad, IMHO. - Unlike corporate workers, nobody is measuring our productivity therefore we have no incentive to close issues if we believe they are unfixed. That means that whe…

> That means that when we close the issue, we believe it has a high chance of being fixed

I agree with this iff it's being done manually after reading the issue. stalebot is indiscriminate and as far as "owing" the user, that's fair, but I'd assume that the person reporting the bug is also doing you a favor by helping you make things more stable and contributing to your repo/tool's community.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#132

Post by eleumik »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #120
afdbcreid wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an open source maintainer, I feel that statement is really unfair. Yes, we do sometimes close bug reports without evidence they are fixed. But: - We owe you nothing! And the fact that people still expect maintainers to work for them is really sad, IMHO. - Unlike corporate workers, nobody is measuring our productivity therefore we have no incentive to close issues if we believe they are unfixed. That means that whe…

Why do you close the issue then?

Because open source is corporate now

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#133

Post by lapcat »

ryukoposting wrote: post #128
NetMageSCW wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell us where you work so we can avoid all of your company’s software. Unless it’s Microsoft, because we’ve already seen the results of that attitude there.

I don't see how it's an unreasonable request. If you demand that I work with some ancient version, I then have to install and uninstall said program every time I work on your ticket specifically. You will be prioritized last, because my effectiveness is measured by how many tickets I close.

> If you demand that I work with some ancient version, I then have to install and uninstall said program every time I work on your ticket specifically.

You completely missed the point of the blog post. Apple was in the process of developing macOS 26.4 beta 4, and they wanted me to install the beta just to "verify" the bug.

Apple could test my bug with 26.4 beta 4 a heck of a lot easier than I could. Nobody was asking Apple to install some ancient version.

> my effectiveness is measured by how many tickets I close.

That was one of the points of the blog post: this is a perverse incentive from management.

Note what you did not say: "my effectiveness is measured by how many bugs I fix." So engineers are incentivized to close tickets even if the bugs they report are unfixed. This is how a company ends up with crappy, buggy software.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#135

Post by lapcat »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #121
ryukoposting wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, bigcorp employee getting showered with tickets here. I don't have enough time in the day to deal with the tickets where the reporter actually tries, let alone the tickets where they don't. If I tell you to update your shit, it's because it's wildly out of date, to the point that your configuration is impossible for me to reproduce without fucking up my setup to the point that I can't repro 8 other tickets.

Back when I worked at Apple I would just try it in whatever I had installed. If it didn't reproduce I'd write "Cannot reproduce in 10.x.x" and close it. Maybe a third were like that, duplicates of some other issue that was resolved long ago. Anyone that attached a repro file to their issue got attention because it was easy enough to test. Sometimes crash traces got attention, I'd open the code and check out what it w…

> But the mistake OP is making is assuming this one thing that annoyed him somehow applies to the whole Apple org. Most issues were up to engineers and project managers to prioritize, every team had their own process when I was there.

Except this same shit keeps happening with multiple teams.

Judging from your mention of QuickDraw, which was removed entirely from macOS in 2012, perhaps your Apple experience is now out of date.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#136

Post by CoolGuySteve »

lapcat wrote: post #135
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I worked at Apple I would just try it in whatever I had installed. If it didn't reproduce I'd write "Cannot reproduce in 10.x.x" and close it. Maybe a third were like that, duplicates of some other issue that was resolved long ago. Anyone that attached a repro file to their issue got attention because it was easy enough to test. Sometimes crash traces got attention, I'd open the code and check out what it w…

> But the mistake OP is making is assuming this one thing that annoyed him somehow applies to the whole Apple org. Most issues were up to engineers and project managers to prioritize, every team had their own process when I was there. Except this same shit keeps happening with multiple teams. Judging from your mention of QuickDraw, which was removed entirely from macOS in 2012, perhaps your Apple experience is now ou…

[flagged]

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#137

Post by afdbcreid »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #120
afdbcreid wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an open source maintainer, I feel that statement is really unfair. Yes, we do sometimes close bug reports without evidence they are fixed. But: - We owe you nothing! And the fact that people still expect maintainers to work for them is really sad, IMHO. - Unlike corporate workers, nobody is measuring our productivity therefore we have no incentive to close issues if we believe they are unfixed. That means that whe…

Why do you close the issue then?

Because I have a reason to believe it's fixed, I have many more like it and it's difficult to reproduce. Simple :)

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#138

Post by aworks »

tottenhm wrote: post #127

In Scotland, they close an issue by taking a vote of "OK", "Broken", or "Not Proven". I believe they also have attorneys. Perhaps that's how Apple could make bug-tracking more effective -- hire a prosecuting attorney and a defending attorney for each bug.

I was an development tools engineering manager who was in enumerable "bug scrubs" to triage the flow.

Sometimes I would advocate based on business reasons to fix the bug. Or to de-prioritize it or close it. I took every side possible, depending. As did the more pragmatic of the engineers.

I miss the give and take, if not the feeling of perpetual technical debt.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#139

Post by afdbcreid »

xmprt wrote: post #131
afdbcreid wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an open source maintainer, I feel that statement is really unfair. Yes, we do sometimes close bug reports without evidence they are fixed. But: - We owe you nothing! And the fact that people still expect maintainers to work for them is really sad, IMHO. - Unlike corporate workers, nobody is measuring our productivity therefore we have no incentive to close issues if we believe they are unfixed. That means that whe…

> That means that when we close the issue, we believe it has a high chance of being fixed I agree with this iff it's being done manually after reading the issue. stalebot is indiscriminate and as far as "owing" the user, that's fair, but I'd assume that the person reporting the bug is also doing you a favor by helping you make things more stable and contributing to your repo/tool's community.

I partially agree, but even with stalebots nobody is measuring the maintainers' productivity. So when they made the choice to use stalebots, they did that because they believe that's best for the project. It's different from corporate.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#140

Post by hu3 »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #105
nradov wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally understand that from the perspective of individual employees: they have little incentive to do more than the bare minimum to close tickets. But this behavior is typically a symptom of broken corporate culture and failure to align internal metrics. For every customer who takes the trouble to submit a formal bug report there are likely many others who just live with it, and badmouth you to other customers. Do…

There's also going to be mountains of bugs resulting from cosmic rays hitting the computer, defective ram chips, weird modifications of the system the reporter hasn't mentioned. You could sink an infinite amount of time investigating and find nothing. At some point you have to cut off the time investment when only one person has reported it and no devs have been able to reproduce it.

I'll steal this to my projects bug template! /s

"Please consider cosmic rays hitting the computer, defective ram chips, weird modifications of the system before submitting the bug. Unlesss you explicitly acknowledge that, your bug will be closed automatically in 30 days. Thank you very much"

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