Apple Bugreporting

Apple has a bug tracking tool called radar and they let any ADC member log bugs into it which they may or may not get around to fixing. They don’t however let anyone outside of Apple view the current bugs in the system. This causes great amounts of flamage on Apple’s java-dev list (and I imagine many of Apple’s other lists as well) about whether or not the list should be open. Every few weeks someone just has to come along and ask how they search the open issues and it starts again. Last time it came up some actual progress was made on the issue. Someone suggested creating a publicly accessible, unofficial bug listing that people could log bugs in, in addition to logging them with Apple, and those bugs would be publicly accessible so that people could find any work arounds that might be available. Of course there are three draw backs to this: 1. People may log the bug just with Apple and not in the 3rd party bug reporter. 2. People may log the bug in the 3rd party reporter and not with Apple. 3. People may see that the bug is already logged in the 3rd party bug reporter and not log it with Apple. Problem 1 is a non-issue. It just means that that particular bug report isn’t publicly available. Too bad, so sad. Problem 2 is a major issue because it means that Apple will never know about the bug and thus never fix it. (Nothing gets done at Apple without a radar issue being created according to the Engineers who’ve commented on the matter) Problem 3 is also a major issue because Apple prioritizes bugs based on how many duplicate reports they get. If people see the bug has already been reported they won’t report it again and Apple will think it’s not important and fix it whenever they get around to it. Obviously the combination of problems 2 and 3 is particularly disastrous. So the question then becomes, how do you create a system that lets people easily log bugs and search for existing bugs while still getting most people to log the bug with Apple? The ideal solution would be to have any bug logged in the public system automatically logged in Apple’s system as well. Existing bugs could have a button that allowed users to log a duplicate bug complete with a reference to the original issue with one click. The trouble with that approach obviously is that it requires access to Apple’s system which I don’t have. I’m not sure they’d appreciate having an automated system screen scraping their bug reporter to log bugs. It also doesn’t encourage people to specifically log their own case and thus can deprive the Apple engineers of that one subtle bit of information that suddenly makes the bug simple to reproduce. It’s probably possible to make the form look just like Apple’s so that it’s a simple matter of copy and paste to log the bug in both systems. A big red notice about how Apple wants to get duplicate bug reports might help alleviate problem 3 but it definitely wouldn’t solve it. All up, I’m just not sure if a publicly available, 3rd party bug database would help or hinder the situation. It would definitely be useful to have a place to go to search for existing work arounds though.