Comments
Comment by Buzz Andersen:
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I’m fairly sure you are wrong to think people are sneering at you. A lot of your experience here simply has to do with the way Apple’s bug tracking works. Though you may think of your bugs as being related, they are really separate issues with separate fixes and should be assigned and tracked separately. Also, while the “closed: insufficient information” status may seem like an inconsistent slap to you, it is really just a reflection of the fact that there is no “closed: developer should separate into different bugs” status in the system.
FWIW, I don’t usually get any more of a friendly reaction for bugs I file internally :-)!
Comment by ssp:
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I agree that there may be no intentional sneering going on but receiving emails with a text snippets saying that someone values your time and the next one blatantly contradicting that makes me think they’re either dumb or taking the piss. For the benefit of Apple, I hope it’s the latter ;)
Filing separate bugs in this case would have meant a whole lot of extra work for me. Not only because I would have had to go through the web form that doesn’t remember my computer configuration a couple of extra times but also because I would have had to add explanations how these bugs really happen when using an application.
In this case, one bug is that Mail doesn’t deal properly with people hitting Shift-Tab in an address field. I guess that wouldn’t be too grave, if it weren’t for the problem that Mail’s autocompletion of addresses sucks and you frequently need to return to the ‘To’ field after having tabbed to the ‘Cc’ field because it didn’t autocomplete.
In this case I would have had to include all this information in every one of the single bug reports. That’s asking pretty much from your paying customers, particularly when Apple (should) have tools to more efficiently deal with all the cross-referencing in their own database.
As discussed in David Hyatts comments, bug reporting is harder in a closed source, closed bug-database, no current builds situation. The approach Apple seem to take for this is that all the increased effort is on me and all the benefit is for them. Needless to say, that I am not too thrilled about this balance.
