Monday, January 30, 2012

Our Engineers Are Aware of the Issue

Andy Finnell:

Word on the street (by which I mean Twitter, since we engineers certainly don’t go outside, much less into the street), is that it’s supposed to be a “polite” way of saying “we’re not going to fix it.” But I’m not sure why they wouldn’t just say “it works as intended”, which is what they used to say, or simply “it will not be fixed.”

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I've been receiving this answer a lot lately too.

The guy who decided to provide that kind of answer - and prevent 3rd party developer from being able to track bugs - has probably been working in a call center and enjoying it (and he should consider going back).

Providing that kind of answer is like saying:

"Hello,

This is a courtesy e-mail regarding Bug ID#xxxxxxxxx.

Thank you for losing time filing this bug report.

We are closing this bug since our engineers are not willing to try to reproduce it or fix it as they are currently resting on their dollar mattress playing with their iPhones.

Please be sure to regularly check the seed notes and release notes for any updates that might affect this issue.

OK, the sentence above is a joke because as you know from the seed notes, there are no known issues in the products we ship. None. Look at Xcode 4 for instance.

Again, thank you for wasting your time to submit bugs. We sincerely appreciate your input, it helps us pretend we're working.

BTW, please note that the URL to connect to Bug Reporter has changed, it's now: dev.null.apple.com
"

This is the kind of thing that finally made me turn away from developing for Mac and iOS. I still use them personally but no longer professionally. It's extremely frustrating to find a bug and all you can do to fix it is to file a radar. I must say that my current focus on FreeBSD and Linux has other drawbacks, but the ability to actually send in a source patch attached to the bug report makes up for that.

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