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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

#61

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…

> Author must not have worked in enterprise software before.

Or with open source projects. Fucking stalebot.

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

#63
I've submitted a couple of issues for their [javascript library for Live Photos](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/LivePhotosKitJS).

One being that the most recent version is on their cdn but not their [npm package](https://www.npmjs.com/package/livephotoskit?activeTab=readme) which was never updated for 7 years. You know what they did with this issue? They've marked it as "Unable to diagnose".

Also I've mentioned something about their documentation not being up to date for a function definition. This issue has remained open for 4 years now.

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

#67
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s easy enough. The hard part is doing so without capturing a bunch of email, messages, and other private data that happens to be in memory at the time.

Ignorant question, if privacy didn’t matter and they had an atomically identical machine, would there still be plenty of edge cases where it was the printer or the Wi-Fi causing the issue? In any case I would have said it sounds difficult on every front

I should be more precise. Capturing the system state isn’t too hard. Turning that into a reproducer may be quite hard, because of things like you say. There are certainly a lot of bugs that such a capture would make easier to figure out, but it wouldn’t be a panacea.

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

#68

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…

[dead]

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

#70
Oh you sweet summer child. Everyone else does this.

Yes, I hate it too.

Put yourself in the position of the employee on the other side. They currently have 647 bugs in their backlog. And they also have actual work to do that's not even related to these bugs.

You come to work. Over night there's 369 emails (after many filters have been applied), 27 new bugs (14 of which are against a previous version). You triage. If you think 8h is enough to deal with 369 emails (67 of which are actionable. But which 67?) and actually close 27 bugs, then… well then you'd be assigned another 82 bugs and get put on email lists for advisory committees.

Before you jump to "why don't they just…", you should stop yourself and acknowledge that this in an unsolved problem. Ignore them, let them pile up? That's not a solution? Close them? No! It's still a problem! Ask you to verify it (and implicitly confirm that you still care)? That's… a bit better actually.

"Just hire more experts"… experts who are skilled enough, yet happy to work all day trying to reproduce these bugs? Sure, you can try. But it's extremely not a "why don't they just…".

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