Bug reporting: tracking issues closed as "duplicate"

The reason is privacy, some bug reporters include project and source files in their reports. If everyone could see the reports, they could see the source files attached to those reports. In addition, hackers could troll the reporting system looking for security vulnerabilities.

There is no harm in filing duplicate bugs, Apple uses this to gauge how serious a bug is.

If you want to find bug reports that might be similar to yours, go to openradar.me. People will copy their Apple bug reports on that site.

Thanks for the link to openradar.me. Sounds like the next best thing.

There are solutions to most of the things you mentioned, like allowing developers to mark bugs as private, and keeping attached files private regardless. As far as hackers trolling, that is certainly the biggest threat IMO, but one that exists anyway with the advent of openradar.me.

The only harm in filing duplicate reports, besides that I cannot track the status when it is closed as duplicate, is the effort required by me to determine that there is indeed an OS bug, and to fill out the report. The last one took me around 6 hours to be confident that it was an OS issue and to file the report. That is a lot of harm to my productivity.

Also, openradar.me will probably discourage developers from filing a bug report if they see its already open, why go through the effort just to have it marked as closed for being duplicate (thats a lot more work than a "vote" would be). It also allows hackers a place to troll. If visibility going to happen anyway via openradar.me, why not try to do it in house and make a better experience for developers and give Apple the ability to better gauge severity with a voting system. Not to mention that Apple could "hide" issues from the public if they are known to be a severe threat.

I appreciate your reply. 🙂 I am just challenging the current solution hoping to encourage a better one.

I just noticed that the bug report I submitted shows the status of the duplicate issue at the top. I can see that the other issue is still open, and this is what I was originally looking for. 😊

I've alwats wondered. Is openradar.me a violation of Developer privacy agreements?

Yes this is at least a good sign, but you do not know wether the original ticket has been closed as fixed (and for which version) or as not reproducable 😉

Hopefully Apple adds that little bit of information to the duplicated tickets. And a notification that the orignal ticket has been closed via mail to all duplicate reporters would be nice.

I wholeheartedly agree that the current solution is substandard. I'm pretty confident it's apple wanting to hide the issues that they have, rather than protect the developer's privacy.

Unfortunately, I doubt Apple could care any less what any of us think.

We'll just have to keep wasting hours of time debugging and then reporting bugs that have already been reported to Apple, only to be rejected as duplicates.