🚀 go-pugleaf

Jesse --
 
I appreciate your points, and agree with your general approach toward QA.
However, I am trying to address some very specific issues with current MacApp
maintenance, faced as we are with the existing situation of many shipping or
soon-to-be-shipping apps and very minimal ongoing Apple support.
 
> You discuss a bug-fix and use phrases like "guaranteed" and "cannot possibly
> cause..." Don't tempt fate.
 
Ah, but to refrain from tempting fate is to refrain from living life itself!
<end of poetical interlude>
 
> Without discussing this particular bug,...
 
This is a specific example. Discussing this particular bug is precisely the
point.
 
> E.g., pushing the size of a code segment up by a few bytes - just enough
> to cause overflows in an application that links user code into that segment.
 
This would happen to the hapless user even after Apple did eight person-weeks
of MacApp QA testing. This is not a QA problem.
 
> We apply bug fixes if we need them (and we usually can do them in subclasses
> of our own)
 
As long as you can do them in subclasses you are reasonably safe. Some do
require modifying the source code, though. (E.g., they affect global
procedures.) In those cases, you have to reapply each fix each time you load an
updated officially-sanctioned release of MacApp. If Apple can put out the fix
in its official Bug Doc, why can't it apply the fixes itself?
 
And if the answer to that is that Apple won't apply the fix until it can do its
eight person-weeks of QA, but Apple _is_ willing to list the fix in its Bug Doc
in the interim, then how dare you apply the bug fix yourself, without your own
eight person-week QA cycle?
 
> "[why do all of these discussions insist that all bug work and QA needs to be
> done in a vacuum???]". The answer is because the greater the degree of
> separation between the coder and the tester, the more likely the
> testing is to be thorough.
 
No, I meant "why do all of these discussions insist that all bug fixes have to
be worked out by Apple (or MADA, or whomever), applied by Apple, tested by
Apple, and officially released by Apple, without recognizing the collective
genius and testing facilities of all the developers on MacAppTech$???"
 
-- Dave