alt Hacker NewsI was literally just coming in here to comment "in before someone says this is fine and there's no issue." and the first(!) comment is effectively "this is fine and there's no issue."
The sentiment feels like software folks are optimizing for the local optimum.
It's the programmer equivalent of "if it's important they'll call back." while completely ignoring the real world first and second-order effects of such a policy.
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It’s really a question of whether a team believes bugs are defects that deserve to be fixed, or annoyances that get in the way of shipping features. And all too often, KPIs and promotions are tied to the features, not the bugs.
Plus, I’ve been in jobs where fixing bugs ends up being implicitly discouraged; if you fix a bug then it invites questions from above for why the bug existed, whether the fix could cause another bug, how another regression will be prevented and so on. But simply ignoring bug reports never triggered attention.
Is it really programmers doing this, though?
These auto-closing policies usually originate from somewhere else.
I have been on the other side where I can't replicate/verfiy and the think the user would tell me if it was fixed. After exhausting myself and contacting the user only to find out it was resolved.
I mean it can be useful to do that every year on old (say 2y+ tickets) but the way it is usually done is completely aisine
Sensible way would be probably something like this
* run cleaning yearly, on bugs say not touched (which is different than age!) for last 2 years * mark bug waiting for answer, add automated comment with "is it still happening/can you reproduce it on newest version?" * if that gets unanswered for say 3 months THEN close it.
that way at least it's "real" issue and even if solution is not being worked on maybe someone will see workaround that sometimes someone posts in the comment. Not create new one that gets closed for being duplicate...
Meanwhile I've seen shit as aisine as making bug stale 30 days after reporting.
If you are looking at it from a business perspective, there is little value to fixing a bug that is not impacting your revenue.
Of course, the developers should be determining if the bug may have a greater impact that will or does cause a problem that impacts revenue before closing it - not doing that is negligent.
Considering Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, raking in money, what consequential effects are you talking about? It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line, which is the only thing they care about.
As a software developer, I don't have any problem with this. If a bug doesn't bother somebody enough for them to follow up, then spend time fixing bugs for people who will. Apple isn't obligated to fix anybody's bug.
It's not like they were nagging him about it - it's been years, and they had major releases in the mean time. Quite possible it was fixed as a side effect of something else.
I've seen this in many teams and it always drives me nuts: "hey this ticket is old and we didn't bother, let's delete it to keep the board clean".
You feeling accomplished by seeing an empty list is not the goal!