[Xquartz-dev] My RADAR report 6165507

[Peter Collinson]

On 15 Dec 2008, at 21:01, Jamie Kennea wrote:

>
> On Dec 15, 2008, at 3:44 PM, Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
>
>> It was a previously reported bug, but *I* (not some bigger-than- 
>> life "they")
>
> You'll forgive my feelings of "Big Brother" towards Radar, the  
> system is rather faceless sometimes to those of us outside of Apple.  
> I hadn't realised that it was your decision, obviously.
>>
I find that one of the problems with Radar is that when you report a  
'duplicate bug' - then you are dismissed and left in limbo. You can  
email asking for progress and you do get a reply. But what should  
happen is that you are 'included', you should be:
a)	given access to any previous dialogue
b)	put on the mailing list for the bug.

Apple is missing a trick here - if I've reported a bug then I've  
generally expended energy in researching it and generating evidence  
and I am quite likely to want to help fix it - but I am excluded.

The other problem is that fixes can sometimes take a long time - when  
I started with Apple I discovered that Mail.app was reporting times in  
the summer as BDT - and not BST. This smacked of old US Centric date  
coding in the app itself rather than using the code in the actual  
underlying operating system that had been working OK for over 20  
years.  The one good thing Nixon did was mess with US daylight saving  
time and as a result UNIX got a world quality date system that worked  
properly everywhere. I reported the Mail.app bug in 2005 - it was a  
duplicate - it wasn't fixed until Leopard. However, it IS fixed -  
sometimes good things come to those who wait.

I note that most of the bugs I reported when I started were duplicates  
- and after getting essentially zero response - I stopped reporting  
bugs until X11 started to be worked on.

Well - putting my money where my mouth is - I've filed this in Radar  
too.. it will probably be a duplicate:-)