I love these kind of bug-hunting stories. The Apple engineer that fixed the bug (and remains nameless), provided an explanation, which happily surprised me. I usually read wry remarks on Twitter about the black hole that's called Radar.
Afaik Apple runs really small teams versus other companies. I know when I once interviewed around FAANG, the Apple teams were significantly smaller (like 5x smaller in some cases…probably also why they aren’t part of this mass tech layoffs). I used to find in my old film job that no matter how much I churned through tickets , there was just no getting out from the stigma of being unresponsive because the person on the other end of the ticket can’t see what your workload and priorities are like. That’s not to say Apple isn’t at fault for having small teams, but I think a lot of people assume the engineers themselves don’t care to fix stuff.
Though at least in my case, I could tell my users that I was working on stuff and to expect it at some time in the future. I assume Apple’s engineers are even more hamstrung by their extreme secrecy. I know the few feedback radars I’ve gotten responses from were basically “can reproduce” to “fixed in the latest OS release” without any feedback in between.
anyway all that is to say, I often see people blame the engineers (you didn’t but I see others do) whereas I think it’s a corporate culture issue that engineers are beholden to.
Wait, you get "can reproduce" responses???
I never get that, I think literally never in over 15 years, but it would be a vast improvement to my bug reporting experience.
1. Submit bug 2. Get a cannot reproduce , please provide more information 3. Submit more info as requested 4. “Okay we can reproduce. Thanks” 5. Nothing for ages 6. Okay it’s fixed
Step number 5 almost always aligns with their OS release (point and major) schedules in my experience. macOS 13.1 just came out so if I filed a minor bug now, I’d probably not hear anything till June (WWDC) or if I’m lucky, in one of the point releases that happens every couple months.
WebKit is open-source, so it is actually one of the few Apple projects where the developers do not not remain nameless (the other big one being Swift).
> the black hole that's called Radar
IIRC WebKit has its own bug tracker, hence why you get better response times. Radar itself is still a terrible and demoralizing experience (from a developer point-of-view)
The funny thing though is that Apple still sends WebKit bugs into Radar to work on them:
There are many reasons for linking bugzilla bugs to radar, but the big ones are scheduling, other project dependencies inside Apple, security reports (so that reporters can be mentioned in release notes, etc).
The important thing is that the b.w.o->radar cross referencing is not for development specifically.
What about discussion?
Do you claim there is no private discussion among Apple engineers about WebKit bugs that have been put "InRadar"?
I see a lot of WebKit bugs that have no discussion whatsoever and just seem to arrive ex nihilo from Radar. You wonder what the reasoning or explanation is for a certain code change, and you'll find absolutely nothing about it in the Bugzilla.
Open source bugs will have private/non-public conversations (whether it's in person, or on slack, or on a seperate issue tracker) all the time. That's not abnormal or all that damning.
Is achieved by talking among each other, or simply by knowing how to fix/implement the feature (not every bug requires any discussion at all). Either in person (which would be inherently "private" as you say), or irc historically - I'm unsure whether irc is still significant as I recall free node dying off or something a few years back?
> Do you claim there is no private discussion among Apple engineers about WebKit bugs that have been put "InRadar"?
No, I'm saying your claim that "The funny thing though is that Apple still sends WebKit bugs into Radar to work on them:" is nonsense. The reason that bugs are cloned to radar is so that they can be tracked for releases. I think you have decided that any time you don't see discussion in b.w.o it means discussion there must be discussion in radar, and that's false. The reality is that most bug fix/feature implementation doesn't require discussion during development, actual recorded discussion happens during review as that systematically results in recording the exchanges.
> I see a lot of WebKit bugs that have no discussion whatsoever and just seem to arrive ex nihilo from Radar.
Again, I think you grossly overestimate the amount of recorded "discussion" that goes with a bug.
> You wonder what the reasoning or explanation is for a certain code change, and you'll find absolutely nothing about it in the Bugzilla.
For many there's not anything in radar either, because many (most?) bugs you see are created to track reviewing the change, and don't exist before the review process. The lack of explanation is typically because the engineers working on changes have the context for why a change is needed, so don't include an explanation.
Yeah, a kind of hostile takeover occurred, which the IRC community did not appreciate.
> Again, I think you grossly overestimate the amount of recorded "discussion" that goes with a bug.
Perhaps so. Seems a bit odd to me though. And a bit lonely :-)
> The lack of explanation is typically because the engineers working on changes have the context for why a change is needed, so don't include an explanation.
Well, I think it's worth noting that this is not very helpful to outsiders who are looking at and working with the code of an open source project.
Even in my closed source self owned projects, I like to provide useful context to my future self. ;-)
People communicate in IRC (or a public slack now based on another comment?), in person, or in email. So when needed communication happens, it's just generally back and forth commentary in a bug is not a particularly good or efficient way to discuss implementation of bug fixes, features, etc.
> Well, I think it's worth noting that this is not very helpful to outsiders who are looking at and working with the code of an open source project.
Because it's a bug tracker being used to track bug fixes, not a tool for communicating with arbitrary people not involved in the project? I don't mean to be glib, but for WK at least that's just not what the bug trackers are used for.
> Even in my closed source self owned projects, I like to provide useful context to my future self.
In the bug report or in the code? Generally IME when code does things that are odd the explanation of that oddness is in the code (assuming not self explanatory) not the bug tracker.
It also depends on the bug itself, bug fixes you'd normally be able to see why a change was made (if not obvious from the title/description) is the attached test cases.
I disagree, because whether it's the intention or not ("it's a bug tracker being used to track bug fixes, not a tool for communicating with arbitrary people not involved in the project"), the bug report de facto becomes an important historical record for understanding the code. In the future, when someone looks back, the question that often comes to mind is "Why?" Why this (that)? Why now (then)? The motive, the historical context, is rarely something that becomes evident just looking at the code, even code with comments.
Can I change this code? Can I delete this code? How did this code ever work? You can't rely on unit tests to tell you the story behind the code. And when you come upon some "questionable" code, it's equally likely that the comments and/or tests are questionable too.
If the code was written to handle something publicly important, if debates were had, alternatives considered, choices made and rejected, that's worth knowing, in my opinion.
Part of which is because the engineers are working on an unreleased feature that they’d like to put up “quietly”.
bugs.webkit.org is literally a bug tracker.
The only relevant difference between Radar and WebKit Bugzilla is private vs. public.
No, this is not true. Radar is not just "a bug tracker" — it is a very powerful project management tool, custom-built over several decades for the way Apple works, with integrations into other internal tools and processes.
It should be obvious why Apple wants to track work being done on Webkit using the same tool it uses to track work being done on every other project at the company.
They closed the ticket a few days later with a picture showing the issue resolved.
B.w.o is where bug fixes happen, no more. Code dev and review has to happen in b.w.o by the webkit community rules, not radar.
I assume internally they’re treated as one component which makes it easier to mirror bugs into radar?