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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!

Eddie
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Did you get an email telling you that your bug report will appear in the Bug Database soon? I filed a report once and it took about a week before appearing in the public database. There are also some caveats regarding bugs that will not be on the public database because of "security reasons".

Zach Scrivena
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  • No such EMail yet. I just got the acknowledgment that the bug was received and would be internally reviewed. – Eddie Jan 27 '09 at 02:36
  • Try replying back to the email they sent you (the one with the internal review ID number in the subject)... maybe they have a good reason for the delay. – Zach Scrivena Jan 27 '09 at 02:40
  • That's all I'm trying to determine! :) I'll try that. – Eddie Jan 27 '09 at 02:43
  • Nope, as I suspected, the EMail bounced immediately. There is no-one listening at the address of the auto-response bot that acknowledged receipt of my bug report. – Eddie Jan 27 '09 at 02:47
  • Well, I guess you could recheck the bug database and submit a fresh report. – Zach Scrivena Jan 27 '09 at 03:40
  • The incident is still there in the waiting state. You may have noticed there's been a lot going on in the deployment area recently, so they are going to be a bit busy and dealing with low priority bugs is going to be a low priority. – Tom Hawtin - tackline Jan 27 '09 at 13:28
  • @Tom, Thanks for the update. At least I know it's still in the system. Do you know of any proper way to get a bug moving that's been waiting a while? Purchasing support? – Eddie Jan 28 '09 at 02:57
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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.

Alan Moore
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  • It's possible to submit patches even for Java 6? For Java 7 I know it's possible. – Eddie Jan 28 '09 at 02:57
  • You mean because it's open-source now? They started accepting patches long before that happened. All the patches I submitted were for 5 and 6. – Alan Moore Jan 29 '09 at 03:40
  • @Alan M: Ah, I didn't know that they would accept patches before Java was opened sourced. Thanks. – Eddie Feb 11 '09 at 20:19
  • Thank you for the advice. I did the research (took two days) to find the bug, and I submitted a patch. It was successful. (The patch was trivial and thus easy to verify.) Thanks again. – Eddie Apr 09 '09 at 21:01
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Ugh.

They sat forever on the bug about incorrect behavior in the Java compiler & specification ("Exception cannot be thrown but it is thrown").

You might stand a chance if you can fix it yourself in the GPL'd Java 7, otherwise you're hosed.

Joshua
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  • Well, it's a trivial bug to fix. Maybe I'll do that, although it won't help me for over a year. (This is used in a shipping product, so we cannot ship a pre-release Java version for client desktops :) – Eddie Jan 27 '09 at 02:36
  • @Joshua can you provide more details on the one they "sat forever" on? – matt b Jan 27 '09 at 02:48
  • For a pointless example: try { Thread.currentThread().stop(new IOException()); } catch (IOException ex) {System.out.println(e);}. It won't even compile. As an experiment I commented out the line in javac producing the error and it did indeed throw IOException. – Joshua Jan 28 '09 at 04:37
  • @Joshua Not a bug - only unchecked or declared exception can be caught. Thread.stop(Throwable) is not *declared* as throwing IOException. The fact that it does so is just internal hackery that violates type safety of checked exceptions...but the compiler cannot be aware of that. – Chad N B Oct 25 '14 at 03:08
  • "only unchecked or declared exception can be caught" is in fact the bug in the spec. Comes up from time to time. – Joshua Oct 27 '14 at 15:07