Open 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 heavily uses Radar internally. Thousands of Apple employees' work-days are defined primarily by what’s in their bug queue.

Also factor in how Apple is an incredibly secretive organization. There’s lots of juicy stuff in Radar, so it’s important to Apple little-to-none of that info escapes into the wild.

External, third-party developers tend not to view Radar as Apple views Radar. They look at organizations and projects with more-open or totally-open bug tracking systems and wonder why Apple isn’t like that.

External developers want an more-open bug tracking system so when we run into problems, we can easily check to see if we're bumping our head on a known issue. Or reference an existing bug so we don’t have to spend the significant period of time to write up an excellent bug report when all we want to do is “vote up” an existing bug we just ran into ourselves.

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.

Sharing bug reports is very important for the indie community, and is the motivation behind things like Apple Bug Friday. We toss around radr:// urls so we can easily reference them when talking to Apple friends and include them when we know for certain we're filing a duplicate.

For over a decade, external developers have been imploring Apple to open up Radar. It’s nearly a rite of passage for new Mac developers.

But just how the request is phrased — “please open Radar” — shuts down the lines of communication and ensures Apple will never open Radar.

As we've seen above, Apple views Radar as an internal system that just happens to have a protected web form that allows outsiders to post things into it. Apple parses “please open Radar” as “please expose your internal secrets”.

Seen that way, you can understand why Apple is reluctant to “open Radar”.

External developers obviously see it differently. I've long advocated that Apple add a checkbox to Radar requests that would flag them as “public” — anyone with a Radar login could search+see them. I would love to make most of my bug reports public, and I suspect most of my fellow developers would as well.

But that was yesterday.

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 (Open Radar also has a twitter account and a lot of this is happening over twitter).

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.

I'll announce it here (and on twitter) when I feel OpenRadar.app is ready for general public usage.

We won’t be getting that “make public” checkbox I've long requested anytime soon, but thanks to a little effort across a few talented people, it looks like we'll finally get that “open” bug tracking system we've been wanting for so long.

Sunday, November 16, 2008
12:00 AM