Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch, a well-known developer has created OpenRadar.app, an OS X application designed to help developers keep track of bugs that they submit to Apple’s internal (private, locked-away, secret) bug-tracking system called Radar.
First, little on Radar:
Radar is Apple’s internal bug tracking system. How Apple views Radar and how external third-party developers view Radar causes a bit of a conflict…
Apple encourages developers to file bugs, even those we know are probably duplicates, in order to “vote up” individual bugs and hopefully give them more priority when it comes time decide schedules.
This duplicate bug-filing encouragement never sat well with external developers, because Radar is completely opaque to us. It’s never clear whether we should spend the considerable time+effort to write up a great bug report (doing so can easily take an entire work-day or two) or if we should just do the minimum since it will just be immediately flagged as a duplicate and then mostly ignored.
Because Radar is opaque, we can’t look at an existing bug report we think is probably a duplicate and realize ours is actually an altogether different bug or that we have a critical piece of information that’s not in the existing bug report.
He goes on to describe the creation of Open Radar. Folks, it’s a thing of beauty:
Kicked off by a tweet from Dave Dribin, Tim Burks created a new Google AppEngine site named Open Radar. It’s already being populated as I type this by different folks, so it looks like it’s taking off… Dave Dribin wrote an app called RadarForwarder that accepts those radr:// urls I mentioned before and opens an Open Radar page for them.
And I just wrote OpenRadar.app, which allows you to file your Radars normally, but captures the information and saves it locally. I’ll be adding auto-upload of that information to Open Radar soon. It’s the next-best-thing to a “make public” checkbox.
Basically, Rentzsch and the others are slowly building an external (public, not secret) carbon copy of what bugs and issues developers submit to Apple. And while at first it will be small, overtime, it will grow into the beast that I’m sure Apple’s internal Radar system is.
It’s a great example of the indie Mac developement community seeing a problem, working together, and solving it.