Question

I attempted to open a Java bug last Halloween. I immediately got a response that my submission was accepted, and have heard nothing since. Looking at Sun’s web pages, I can’t found any contact information where I can inquire. Almost two weeks ago I made a post in the Sun forums in what appears to be the most appropriate area and have no response there either.

Has anyone had success getting Sun to open a bug report after a long period of non-response? Does anyone know who I can contact to find out the current status of my bug report?

For what it’s worth, the internal review ID I was given is 1380005.

Edit, added later:

For the curious: What is the bug? The Java Web Start client, when downloading JAR files (or anything else), always adds an If-Modified-Since header (with a time-date equivalent of ‘-1‘ — 1 second before midnight 1-1-1970 — no matter whether the Java cache is empty or full) and always adds a No-Cache header. Note: This is the client side that supplies the No-Cache header!

Answer 1

I’ve had mixed results when submitting bug reports. I’ve submitted quite a few bug reports/RFE’s related to the java.util.regex package; they always appeared in the public database within a few weeks, and were usually resolved to my satisfaction fairly quickly. But that’s probably because the regex package is small and largely self-contained. I’ve also submitted a few Swing-related bug reports, and they always took ages to go through, if they went through at all.

But I discovered two things I could do to speed things up: post questions about the bugs in the JavaDesktop forums, and submit patches. It’s been a year or more since I was there last, but back then there were actual Sun employees participating those forums, and if they saw merit in your bug report, they could shepherd it through the system–especially if you submitted a patch.