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

lapcatsoftware.com

281–290 of 314 posts

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

#281
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flagging isn't supposed to be used as a super downvote. There's a term for the bizarre behavior and thought processes (read: justification) by the person you're responding to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_psychosis > > you are being extremely reasonable They're not. If there's nothing wrong with it, one could ask whether the person here would be okay sitting in a room with their supervisor, the head of…

Did I say it's how it should be, or did I say this is how it is? It's a reasonable request given the unreasonable nature of my working conditions, a thing I have no power to change.

You are an exasperatingly selfish and un-self-aware person. You should not be mentoring children. This is enshittification personified:

> One of these will allow you to[…] get a raise

> given the unreasonable nature of my working conditions, a thing I have no power to change

You know that there are people who experience actual hardship, right?

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

#282
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And total 24/7 surveillance also makes police work easier, but it's still wrong.

...you're claiming error tracking and monitoring are wrong?

We're talking about companies you voluntarily have a relationship with, not the government

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

#283
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And total 24/7 surveillance also makes police work easier, but it's still wrong.

...you're claiming error tracking and monitoring are wrong? We're talking about companies you voluntarily have a relationship with, not the government

The telemetry is almost always not voluntary and neither is the relation ship with the companies in the first place unless you mean that technically you could become a hermit living in the woods.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deficated?

I like this. It should be a status. "I deficated this issue. Closed."

This was supposed to be "dedicated", but I might also be coming around :)

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think asking someone if they can still reproduce an issue is valid. Especially if it was trivially reproducible for them, and now it isn't, that seems like a fine resolution, and the bug should be closed. But in the other cases, closing the bug seems to me to be a way to perturb metrics. It might be true that you'll never fix a given bug, but shouldn't there be a record of the "known defects", or "errata" as some c…

Bug reports are not known defects, at any kind of scale half of them will be already fixed, misunderstandings, bad data in, or related to an unusual setup. Closing the bug is a way of saying: sorry this doesn’t look too important and we don’t have time to look at this given the other more important things (bugs/features) we plan to work on. If it’s closed as stale after 6-12 months (multiple humans will have seen it)…

> at any kind of scale half of them will be already fixed, misunderstandings, bad data in,

Here you're referring to a class of bug reports that's uninteresting for this discussion, because they're invalid (i.e. they don't represent an actual bug). We're talking about valid bugs that have not been fixed.

> or related to an unusual setup

Unusual, but ostensibly supported? Then there exists a bug.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my reply to eminence32 - bug tracking serves as a list of known defects, not as a list of work the engineers are going to do this [day/month/year].

The primary purpose is not usually a list of known defects and many ‘bugs’ are not actually bugs but feature requests or misunderstandings from users (e.g. RFC disallows the data you want my html parser to allow).

> The primary purpose is not usually a list of known defects and many ‘bugs’ are not actually bugs but feature requests

IME there are separate mechanisms to track feature work, bug trackers are for... bugs.

> or misunderstandings from users (e.g. RFC disallows the data you want my html parser to allow).

Again, this is a class of bug report that nobody is arguing should stay open.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where a company that categorizes customer feedback like unwrap.ai or enterpret could help with volume and priority

No.

Sheesh, you see suggestions here all the time. Just trying to be helpful

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

#288
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this. It should be a status. "I deficated this issue. Closed."

This was supposed to be "dedicated", but I might also be coming around :)

number-1 type bugs and number-2 type bugs...

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

#289
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

Yes and no.

Funny you mention Microsoft because I used to see bug reports for Windows. I can tell you there was a ton of low quality "SOMEONE HACKED MY COMPUTER" or similar feedback (and sometimes just unintelligible ranting) that was completely inactionable or unreproducible. I otherwise do agree with your premise that large monopolistic businesses can sit on large swaths of feedback without worrying about competition - and that this is a problem.

However, for most software projects and businesses, the lack of repeated feedback is a signal that the issue isn't important.

As a user I would hope that the software author/publisher is prioritizing important problems. Closing one ticket is not indicative of organizational rot, as you say.

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

#290
post #55

Story time. I used to work for Facebook (and Google) and lots of games were played around bugs. At some point the leadership introduced an SLA for high then medium priority bugs. Why? because bugs would sit in queues for years. The result? Bugs would often get downgraded in priority at or close to the SLA. People even wrote automated rules to see if their bugs filed got downgraded to alert them. Another trick was to…

> I don't think you can trust engineering teams (or, worse, individuals) to "own" bugs. They're not going to want to do them.

I will disagree there. The engineers often want to fix the bugs. Management is telling them they need it's all hands on deck for (Insert company goal here. Probably AI right now).

Followed by management also telling them they have too many bugs, of course. In a condescending tone.

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