CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE or how Apple deals with bugs
In the open source world, its quite common to see bug statuses as CLOSED, RAWHIDE (on Fedora, to tell you its in the current development version). Sometimes, you also see CLOSED, CURRENTRELEASE (which usually implies that they’ve bumped the minor version number up, and have pushed the update to you, via yum/up2date). Sometimes, CURRENTRELEASE is used to define ERRATA (though with a fast moving project like Fedora, you tend not to really have errata releases – this is more RHEL-space).
Bottom-line: I get my bug fixes, for free.
Over a year ago, I reported a bug to Apple about an iChat error I was getting, that gave me a Feedbag Error 10. I’ve definitely got numerous other radar entries, but no point linking to them, since there’s no public bug tracker. Today, Apple basically closed the bug as CURRENTRELEASE (or really, what they meant to do was close it as NEXTRELEASE). And as a consequence, they’ve decided that charging me AUD$158 would be the most appropriate course of action. They’ve told me to upgrade to Leopard!
I won’t paste the message here, because that’s apparently under NDA (how can you really NDA a bug report? I’ve seen radar numbers being posted on the Web before… and its not like my bug report, which is my own, isn’t public – maybe if there were actually responses from Apple engineers, then it’d become private). But to paraphrase, Apple Engineering thinks my bug has been fixed in the commercially available Leopard, and upon installing the new software, my bug will most likely be fixed.
Bottom-line: I have to become $158 poorer. Or renew my ADC membership, and wait patiently for the mail (really, why do they even bother sending updates on CD/DVD monthly, when pretty much every Mac developer is connected to the Internet? Waste of resources Apple, how non-green of you, worse, thinking that Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for all his work. The only good thing about renewing an ADC membership is possibly the free t-shirt, the occasional pushes of OS X on DVD, and the hardware discount, if utilised).
Technorati Tags: fedora, apple, macosx, bugs, bugzilla, apple radar, bug status, adc
So why do you use Mac OS/X then? Why not just use Linux everywhere?
Russell: Because there are just some things that Linux, can’t do. Or can’t do well enough, yet. Frankly, from what I gather, I’ve gone about 80+ days without using OS X, but for driving a film scanner, I need to utilise it (I can so dream about Linux drivers…)
Sadly, the graphics world in Linux is catching up, but not quite “there” yet. While the GIMP is comparable to Photoshop in every release, workflow management, for RAW camera files for instance, is generally not available
Serious photography and graphics work, is just impossible, on Linux (currently)