Fix Radar or GTFO • Hacker News Board

Re: Fix Radar or GTFO

#21

Post by makecheck » Wed, May 09, 2012, 1:48 PM UTC

There's already an effort to do this:

http://fixradarorgtfo.com/

500+ developers so far have submitted this to Apple.

Re: Fix Radar or GTFO

#22

Post by veidr » Wed, May 09, 2012, 2:02 PM UTC

I once had an interesting experience when visiting Apple. I was telling a DTS engineer about a gnarly bug in the Cocoa text system I had found (certain text editing sequences would silently corrupt the undo stack; user might not notice until they accidentally did a select-all and delete, and then tried to undo to get their novel back).

I never got any feedback on this bug at all (just like always).

But, this Apple guy looked up the bug on their internal radar tool (a native Mac app, not some crappy web interface). There were screens full of discussion, with engineer's names I recognized, and the bug has been elevated to "Show-Stopper" status, which he told me meant the next release wouldn't ship without a fix.

What I took from this is that Apple's internal tools for bug triage, discussion, and prioritization are relatively sophisticated and heavily used, but they have nothing to do with the pathetic, rude, uninformative Radar interface that we peons who pay Apple for the privilege of developing for their platform get to see. It was kind of interesting to get a peek inside from their perspective.

Having said that, though, I almost never file Radar issues anymore, for exactly the same reason that I don't go to Apple's offices and clean their toilets for free.

Re: Fix Radar or GTFO

#23

Post by mikeash » Wed, May 09, 2012, 2:25 PM UTC

Gring wrote: post #9

This has been solved already: http://openradar.appspot.com If you file a new bug with Apple, publish it here as well. No more black hole, you can see what others have already posted. You can even see what duplicates are about (if the original bug was also at open radar).

Open Radar is great, but it doesn't even attempt to solve the problem of lack of feedback from Apple.

Re: Fix Radar or GTFO

#24

Post by mikeash » Wed, May 09, 2012, 2:26 PM UTC

Bxstraz wrote: post #10

damncabbage wrote: post #5

"Fix Radar or... Carry on making large sums of money regardless." Developers aren't their primary concern. Look at Xcode for crying out loud (and wonder at its magical ever-crashing nature).

XCode has never crashed for me in 3+ years. Your project is corrupt. You're doing something wrong. Look to a professional for assistance with your IDE.

I crash Xcode many times a day. Go on, tell me I'm not a professional, or that I'm doing something wrong. I dare you.

Re: Fix Radar or GTFO

#25

Post by npsimons » Wed, May 09, 2012, 2:31 PM UTC

Did anyone else click on the link hoping for a nice juicy technical article about RADAR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar) and not some whining about a piece of software that would have been fixed by now if it was open source?

Re: Fix Radar or GTFO

#26

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 09, 2012, 2:35 PM UTC

npsimons wrote: post #25

Did anyone else click on the link hoping for a nice juicy technical article about RADAR ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar ) and not some whining about a piece of software that would have been fixed by now if it was open source?

[deleted]

Re: Fix Radar or GTFO

#27

Post by acdha » Wed, May 09, 2012, 3:25 PM UTC

I've filed many bugs with Apple over the years. There are two strategies which work:

1. For security issues, use full disclosure. I received phone calls immediately when I included something like "disclosure in 30 days unless otherwise requested". Otherwise bugs were fixed in the next OS release a year later.

2. Otherwise: our Apple rep (.edu) told us that bugs were prioritized based on how many Macs you couldn't buy until it was fixed. Later, this changed to how the bug was preventing you from deploying iPhones (“iPhone: it's like sudo for Apple”) and I imagine this now includes iPads.

Re: Fix Radar or GTFO

#28

Post by acdha » Wed, May 09, 2012, 3:27 PM UTC

n9com wrote: post #3

If you file a bug report on Radar, unless you know someone at Apple who you can give the Report ID to, it is unlikely to be dealt with quickly. Seems like they don't have a dedicated team overlooking it.

This is definitely false: they respond quickly with initial triage. The main problem is that you will subsequently almost never hear anything from them and if your issue was reported as a duplicate you'll need to manually poll them over email for the status.

Re: Fix Radar or GTFO

#29

Post by lucian1900 » Wed, May 09, 2012, 3:32 PM UTC

makecheck wrote: post #21

There's already an effort to do this: http://fixradarorgtfo.com/ 500+ developers so far have submitted this to Apple.

I'm impressed how nicely formatted that letter is in a fixed-width font.

Re: Fix Radar or GTFO

#30

Post by tptacek » Wed, May 09, 2012, 3:35 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #27

I've filed many bugs with Apple over the years. There are two strategies which work: 1. For security issues, use full disclosure. I received phone calls immediately when I included something like "disclosure in 30 days unless otherwise requested". Otherwise bugs were fixed in the next OS release a year later. 2. Otherwise: our Apple rep (.edu) told us that bugs were prioritized based on how many Macs you couldn't buy…

"Disclosure in 30 days unless otherwise requested".

I love this so much. "Unless otherwise requested". Perfect.