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

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

#301

Post by grey-area »

youarentrightjr wrote: post #286
grey-area wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people who filed them would disagree and many would vehemently argue that their bug is in fact a bug, and is the most important bug and how dare you close it.

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

#302

Post by angiolillo »

youarentrightjr wrote: post #33
eminence32 wrote: post #16

I recognize that this is annoying from a user perspective, but I do understand it. Not all bugs are easily reproducible (and even if they are 100% reproducible for the user, it's not always so easy for the developers). Also sometimes you make a change to the code that you think might be in a related area, and so sometimes the most "efficient" thing is just to ask the user to re-test. When I close an old bug that is n…

> keeping the bug open when realistically I can't really do anything with it might be worse I've heard this from others before but I really don't understand the mindset. What's the harm in keeping the bug open?

> What's the harm in keeping the bug open?

Conversely, what's the harm in closing the bug? (As long as you don't lock or delete it, I agree that's bad.)

People focused on the work often interpret "open" to mean "requires work" and "closed" to mean "no planned work" in which case keeping an unreproducible bug open is dishonest because it falsely implies that someone might continue to work on it.

Whereas people focused on the problem often interpret "open" to mean "not fixed" and "closed" to mean "fixed" in which case closing an unreproducible bug is dishonest because it falsely implies that it's no longer a problem.

Neither seems right or wrong as long as everyone on the project agrees which interpretation you're using.

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

#303

Post by throw948384dji »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #38

My only positive experience reporting bugs post early startup was with the chromium team, i get usually assigned to a dedicated reproducer that verifies and is reachable for helping them recreate in a matter of a few days. I had two experiences where bugs were taking less than a week from report to fix in canary.

I’ve had the worst experiences with Chromium. I’ve found multiple regressions in Chromium, tracked down regression points to a single commit, provided clear reproduction steps, shown that they do not reproduce with either Safari and Firefox or even older Chromium... And then the bugs were just ignored for years at this point. Sometimes some people played ping pong with the assignee field, before leaving it unassigned, and that’s it.

I don’t report any new Chromium regressions I find anymore.

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

#304

Post by angiolillo »

willdr wrote: post #41
eminence32 wrote: post #16

I recognize that this is annoying from a user perspective, but I do understand it. Not all bugs are easily reproducible (and even if they are 100% reproducible for the user, it's not always so easy for the developers). Also sometimes you make a change to the code that you think might be in a related area, and so sometimes the most "efficient" thing is just to ask the user to re-test. When I close an old bug that is n…

How is that worse? Leaving it open signals to anyone searching about it that's it's still an issue of concern. It will show up in filters for active bugs, etc. Closing it without fixing it just obfuscates the situation. It costs nothing (except pride?) to leave "Issues (1)" if there is indeed an Issue.

To some people "open" means "not fixed" whereas to others it means "more work planned". I've worked on projects with both interpretations and it's fine as long as everyone is on the same page.

> It costs nothing (except pride?) to leave "Issues (1)" if there is indeed an Issue.

In our case we omit bugs we couldn't reproduce from the issues list due to practicality, not pride -- our software has tens of thousands of unreproducible bugs and having them show up in reports would drown out planned work.

And it's not like anyone deleted or locked the unreproducible bugs, they are either tracked as "open but unreproducible" or "closed because unreproducible". Either way they're still in the database in case more information comes along, but still filtered out of the vast majority of dashboards.

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

#305

Post by angiolillo »

ptman wrote: post #231
BrenBarn wrote: post #122

All kinds of open source projects do this too. It's really annoying. It's one thing if the authors actually try and fail to verify the bug, but these days it seems like most projects just close "stale" bugs as a matter of course. This is equivalent to assuming that any given bug is automatically fixed after X amount of time, which is pretty absurd.

Stalebot closing is a problem. There's no problem with stalebot adding a stale label (but really, a filter with last update x time ago does the same). Adding filters so that developers only look at actionable tickets would be much more sane.

> Adding filters so that developers only look at actionable tickets would be much more sane.

That's a reasonable approach, but I don't understand how it's any more or less sane than autoclosing them with a stale label.

Whether these sorts of bugs are "open but stale" or "closed because stale" seems like it depends on whether the project defines "closed" as "no work planned" or "fixed", which both seem valid.

Either way these bugs will be hidden from developer dashboards but still available in the database so there's no practical difference, you just need to make sure everyone is on the same page about the meaning of "closed".

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

#306

Post by jlarocco »

gortok wrote: post #43
jlarocco wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, raking in money, what consequential effects are you talking about? It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line, which is the only thing they care about. As a software developer, I don't have any problem with this. If a bug doesn't bother somebody enough for them to follow up, then spend time fixing bugs for people who will. Apple isn't obligated…

> It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line, which is the only thing they care about. I want to draw out this comment because it's so antithetical to what Apple marketed that it stood for (if you remember, the wonderful 1984 commercial Apple created; which was very much against the big behemoths of the day and the way they operated). We're at the point where we've normalized crappy behavior and crappy softw…

> We've optimized for profit instead of happiness and customer satisfaction.

It's easy to blame the companies, but if the consumers keep buying the shitty products then there's no reason for the companies to spend money fixing stuff. I stopped using Apple long ago because I thought the software quality was going to crap. A lot of people won't do that, and so they get what Apple gives them.

Still, as a software engineer, I don't see a problem closing out old, abandoned bugs. Even for a company of Apple's size, there's limited time and sometimes it can be literally impossible to fix all of the bugs in a way that satisfies the people opening them. Given that, their approach for deciding which bugs to close seems reasonable and more fair then other ways of doing it.

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

#307

Post by dTal »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #229
atherton94027 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends, support is usually the first thing companies adjust when they want to improve their margins. Even when you're paying millions to AWS you have to get through their first line of support and they will ask silly questions until you can convince them to escalate.

So build barely usable products that force people to pay for support as an upsell.

Aka the Red Hat business model. It's all you have when access to the product itself is free. Gotta keep yourself in the loop somehow.

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

#308

Post by saagarjha »

nullpoint420 wrote: post #287
saagarjha wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No.

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

For this Apple would have to trust a third party with their bugs and also not have tried to do this themselves

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

#309

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

dTal wrote: post #307
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So build barely usable products that force people to pay for support as an upsell.

Aka the Red Hat business model. It's all you have when access to the product itself is free. Gotta keep yourself in the loop somehow .

‘Oh you want to access help documents indexed by google? Please show us your enterprise licence to continue.’

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

#310

Post by nullpoint420 »

saagarjha wrote: post #308
nullpoint420 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For this Apple would have to trust a third party with their bugs and also not have tried to do this themselves

I 100% agree when it comes to security issues. They would have to host it themselves on their intranet through AppleConnect.

I'm a bit removed from what software Apple uses nowadays. Back when I worked there ~2021 it was still a mix of native apps (Radar, Phantom) and self-hosted enterprise versions of popular development tools. (eg. GitHub)

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