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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

#151
post #7
post #2

to be fair this is pretty common spring cleaning in any bugzilla...

I was literally just coming in here to comment "in before someone says this is fine and there's no issue." and the first(!) comment is effectively "this is fine and there's no issue." The sentiment feels like software folks are optimizing for the local optimum. It's the programmer equivalent of "if it's important they'll call back." while completely ignoring the real world first and second-order effects of such a pol…

I mean it can be useful to do that every year on old (say 2y+ tickets) but the way it is usually done is completely aisine

Sensible way would be probably something like this

* run cleaning yearly, on bugs say not touched (which is different than age!) for last 2 years * mark bug waiting for answer, add automated comment with "is it still happening/can you reproduce it on newest version?" * if that gets unanswered for say 3 months THEN close it.

that way at least it's "real" issue and even if solution is not being worked on maybe someone will see workaround that sometimes someone posts in the comment. Not create new one that gets closed for being duplicate...

Meanwhile I've seen shit as aisine as making bug stale 30 days after reporting.

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

#152
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very common but it's still a poor practice.

Basically every single old bug report I've ever seen is essentially a red-herring that is usually not able to be reproduced anymore after N years and takes away time from focusing on newer and more solvable issues. I don't see the issue with removing that noise if it's no longer being reported, but to each their own I suppose.

sure. But you can say put "please verify whether it is still present" via bot before doing so. Which apple did and I'm not sure why blogpost author is complaining about that

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

#153
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From experience with Microsoft (paid) support (after doing 5 tickets because it's never the right team and apparently moving tickets internally is for losers), they will ask for proof of the reproduction. And they will take every opportunity to shift the blame ("Oh I can see in the log you're running an antivirus, open a ticket with them. Closed").

I recompiled OpenSSL to make s_server -www return the correct, static XML blob for a .NET application that was buggy to make a reproducer for them that didn't rely on our product at all and which could be self-contained on a very barren windows VM they could play with to their heart's content and which didn't even care about the network because everything was connecting via loopback, so they couldn't blame that, eite…

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

#154
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From experience with Microsoft (paid) support (after doing 5 tickets because it's never the right team and apparently moving tickets internally is for losers), they will ask for proof of the reproduction. And they will take every opportunity to shift the blame ("Oh I can see in the log you're running an antivirus, open a ticket with them. Closed").

It'd kind of sad, how the market went. I suppose there are pluses too. But back in the 80s and 90s, margins were significantly higher. If you look at hardware, I recall selling hardware with 30% margin, if not more... even 80% on some items. Yet what came with that was support, support, support. And when you sell 5 computers a month, instead of 500, well.. you need that margin to even have a store. Which you need, be…

High end enterprise products still come with support. That's literally what customers are paying for: a single throat to choke.

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

#155
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.

There's obviously some nuance here, but the fact is that much modern software is riddled with bugs, and this is sub-optimal for everyone (both software users and software builders). Most of the bugs which frustrate and irritate software users are not due to uncontrollable events such as cosmic rays flipping a bit. Most of them are plain old code defects.

But, you do have a valid point. Allow me to rephrase it this way: The answer is not for software companies to spend unbounded amounts of engineer time chasing every reported bug.

But there are ways that we, as an industry, can do better, and it's not by pouring all our time into chasing hard-to-diagnose bugs. Here are a few ways that I personally see:

1. Some very powerful technologies for finding many bugs with little engineering effort already exist, but are not widely used. As an example, coverage-guided fuzzing is amazingly good at finding all kinds of obscure bugs. The idea of coverage-guided fuzzing was known from the 1990's, but it took AFL (in ~2013) to take it mainstream. Even now, much of the industry is not benefiting from the awesome power of coverage-guided fuzzing. And there are other, equally powerful techniques which have been known for a long time, but are even less accessible to most software developers.

So: spread the word about such techniques, and for programming language/platform developers, work on making them more easily applicable. This could help many software companies to catch a great number of bugs before they ever go to production.

2. Similarly, there are extant historical computing systems which had very powerful debugging facilities, much better than what is currently available to most developers. The ideas on how to make our platforms more debuggable are already out there; it's now a matter of popularizing those ideas and making them readily accessible and applicable.

3. Since it's widely known that many bugs (real bugs, not "cosmic rays") are extremely hard to reproduce, an admirable target for us to aim for as developers is to implement debug logging in a way which allows us to root-cause most obscure bugs just by examining the logs (i.e. no need to search for a reproducer). Some real-world systems have achieved that goal, with very good results.

4. While there is currently much buzz about using LLM-based coding agents to write code, I think an almost better use case for coding agents is in triaging bug reports, diagnosing the bugs, finding reproducers, etc.

I've recently had a couple of shocking experiences where, just given a written description of an intermittent, hard-to-diagnose bug, a coding agent was able to search an entire codebase, identify the exact cause, and write a reproducer test case. (And this after multiple experienced human programmers had looked at the issue but failed to identify the cause.)

In summary, I think there are ways to "cut the Gordian knot" of bug reports.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically every single old bug report I've ever seen is essentially a red-herring that is usually not able to be reproduced anymore after N years and takes away time from focusing on newer and more solvable issues. I don't see the issue with removing that noise if it's no longer being reported, but to each their own I suppose.

sure. But you can say put "please verify whether it is still present" via bot before doing so. Which apple did and I'm not sure why blogpost author is complaining about that

> you can say put "please verify whether it is still present" via bot before doing so. Which apple did

No, that's not what Apple did. They said, "Please verify this issue with macOS 26.4 beta 4", a very specific version, implying that they actually fixed the bug in that specific beta version (spoiler: they didn't). And I would have to go out of my way to install that specific beta just to "verify" the bug. Moreover, they gave me only 2 weeks to verify before closing the bug that they hadn't responded to at all in 3 years.

They suddenly created artificial urgency for no apparent reason.

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

#157

Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. That's a classic trick where the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything. And if it doesn't get confirmed then they can close it as User Error or Not Reproducible. Of course, the only way to counter this is by saying "Yes I verified it" without actu…

Yep. On the other side of the curtain this often isn't nefarious. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis of spending time on something that one user is complaining about versus a backlog of higher business priorities. I've seen this in my work and it makes me sad for the user, but it often does take a bit of effort to spear these bug reports through.

  > this often isn't nefarious. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis of spending time on something that one user is complaining about versus a backlog of higher business priorities.
You can triage without closing tickets. So it is nefarious. It is metric hacking

If you're having trouble reproducing, tag "needs verification" or something else. But closing a ticket isn't triaging, it is sweeping problems under the rug

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

#158
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the ~50000 engineers at Apple are conspiring to close your tickets in the exact same way. It's ridiculous

Not my tickets specifically. I don't think they're out to get me individually. On the contrary, this is a common practice, which affects many developers. I just happen to be relatively loud, as far as blogging is concerned.

Yes I understand that. ~50000 engineers aren't conspiring to close all tickets that way. It's a stupid line of thinking.

More than likely your steps to reproduce are too laborious to receive attention relative to the value fixing the bug would provide. That's why they're asking you to verify it still happens. Seems pretty simple right?

There's also a strong chance your ticket was linked as a duplicate of some other issue that was fixed in the beta and they want you to verify that's the case but they won't expose their internal issue to you for a variety of reasons.

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

#159
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my tickets specifically. I don't think they're out to get me individually. On the contrary, this is a common practice, which affects many developers. I just happen to be relatively loud, as far as blogging is concerned.

Yes I understand that. ~50000 engineers aren't conspiring to close all tickets that way. It's a stupid line of thinking. More than likely your steps to reproduce are too laborious to receive attention relative to the value fixing the bug would provide. That's why they're asking you to verify it still happens. Seems pretty simple right? There's also a strong chance your ticket was linked as a duplicate of some other i…

> ~50000 engineers aren't conspiring to close all tickets that way.

I didn't say that either. It's happened to me only sporadically, but multiple times.

I agree with you that teams within Apple manage their own tickets. Perhaps some individual teams are declaring bug bankruptcy at some point, so only their bugs would go out for verification. I don't really know. I wish I did. What I do know is that multiple teams have done this at different points.

There's indisputably a company-wide DevBugs canned response for this. It's the same exact language every time. You can even Google it.

> It's a stupid line of thinking.

Please respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> More than likely your steps to reproduce are too laborious to receive attention. That's why they're asking you to do it.

It was much more laborious for me, because I do not install the macOS betas.

> Seems pretty simple right?

No, it doesn't explain why specifically, after 3 years, they were suddenly asking me to verify with macOS 26.4 beta 4.

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

#160

Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. That's a classic trick where the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything. And if it doesn't get confirmed then they can close it as User Error or Not Reproducible. Of course, the only way to counter this is by saying "Yes I verified it" without actu…

Yep. On the other side of the curtain this often isn't nefarious. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis of spending time on something that one user is complaining about versus a backlog of higher business priorities. I've seen this in my work and it makes me sad for the user, but it often does take a bit of effort to spear these bug reports through.

I can sort of back that for desktop apps but telemetry is so trivial for webapps needing a reproducer is almost an embarrassing admission the operator has no clue what they're doing.

Error tracking and tracing make it fairly straight forward to retroactively troubleshoot unreproducible issues.

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