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How Healthy is Tiger?

T

TigerPRO

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 27, 2003
414
0
Wisconsin
It seems to always happen after Apple releases an upgrade to Mac OS X: the Apple support forums will be filled to the gills with critical bugs galore. My comment is that this seems to be a poor pattern with new software releases from Apple. In other words they seemed rushed most of the time. Because I seem to remember certain major issues about Panther's initial exhibition; FileVault to name one example.

My question is, how do the developers feel about how solid Tiger is in it's latter stages compared to what Panther was. Is it better, worse, or about the same? My worry is with such a huge update, that we will see the greatest number of problems ever. Because it seems no matter how hard all these beta testers work at ironing out bugs, there is always a large group of people reporting huge problems after installing it. Why is that?
 
You're the "TigerPro", you tell us. :D

EDIT: Beat me too it

Actually, a Dev told me that tiger is pretty much done. Its really just a few bugs on specific machines. Like he said the 14' iBook as some weird random issure. I really don't know how true any of this is, but I figured I'd pass it along.
 
broken_keyboard said:
I thought they weren't allowed to talk about unreleased stuff.
Are you trying to get your Macrumors buddies in trouble?
Click to expand...

Someone make the correction if I'm wrong, but there should be violation in merely discussing "how one feels" about Tiger in general. In case you missunderstood, this disscusion is about the development process, not the development itself.
 
grapes911 said:
You're the "TigerPro", you tell us. :D
Click to expand...

LOL. This is going to drive me crazy. I actually conjured up the moniker "TigerPRO" way back in 1998. That was way before Mac OS X, and even before I started using Apple computers. But several months ago that coincidence did occur to me. I can't wait until Tiger is over. :eek:

By the way, its "TigerPRO" not "TigerPro". That's an important distinction. Its kinda like saying "Ipod" instead of "iPod". I'm sure you see now. ;)
 
Tiger is nearly ready. I'm currently running 393, which is from the end of February. I felt confident enough to upgrade from Panther on my main machine, and haven't felt the need to go back. Its a great system. True, there are problems. Safari seems to be the worst in this build... Its pretty unstable, and sometimes has trouble with large forms (I had to write this in Camino). Also, after 3 or 4 days of constant use, the finder tends to break. It will not display anything, and requires a reboot.

All in all, it feels a lot like the Windows XP machine I switched from, and is miles ahead of the Windows ME days stability-wise. Its not up to 10.3.8 standards, but its still good.
 
My understanding is the latest seed is solid with one major (known) bug.

I think Tiger is going to be fantastic and solid. People in the forums have been a little harsh lately, imho.
 
One thing which I haven't heard has been addressed, which I hope people take heed is the Firewire conundrum:

http://www.macmaps.com/firewirebug2.html

A few basic lessons learned from the conundrum:

1. If you are uncertain that your drive has a bridge whose firmware has been updated, and there is no update available from the vendor who made your drive's case you should assume that one of the problems the conundrum exhibits may happen to your drive.

2. You can remove the hard drive and put it in a Granite Digital case, and avoid the conundrum altogether.

3. You can buy an OWC hard drive and/or LaCie drive and feel comfortable that it too will not face the problem.

4. The conundrum will exhibit one of the following behaviors

- inability to leave the drive powered on while restarting, shutting down, or starting up the computer (including forced restarts). Doing so, will make the drive invisible to all but Prosoft Data Rescue upon the next time you see the drive assuming it is kept connected to the same Firewire/IDE bridge.

- inability to leave the drive connected (on or off) when updating the operating system using one of Apple's updater programs. Doing so, will make the drive invisible to all but Prosoft Data Rescue upon the next time you see the drive assuming it is kept connected to the same Firewire/IDE bridge.

5. Occasionally these drives will become visible again if moved to another Firewire/IDE bridge that does not suffer from the conundrum.

Before 10.3 the conundrum did not show up. Afterwards, it appears that many Firewire vendors did not make their firmware up to date to avoid these issues. I've oft asked Apple at http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/ to fix these issues, but they are still experienced by people in 10.3.8.

What really is messed up about this is that it is Apple which licenses the Firewire technology to all vendors who use it. You would have thought Apple would revoke the license to those members who don't keep their bridges up to date. Unfortunately Apple has not done so, and the customers are left in the lurch.
 
I've been running the latest Tiger Build 8a420 and it seems to be pretty rock solid, I havent had any problems at all, except with being unable to sync with .mac which is a temporary issue according to the seed note. My only other niggle is that there can be a slight pause waiting for some widgets in dashboard to update, spotlight performace has improved in the lsat couple of builds and I cant fault it now , it seems all good!!
 
TigerPRO said:
Because it seems no matter how hard all these beta testers work at ironing out bugs, there is always a large group of people reporting huge problems after installing it. Why is that?
Click to expand...
It's simple math really. When you go from a user base of hundreds to a user base of 10's of thousands, you are bound to discover a number of bugs that were previously undiscovered.
 
topgunn said:
It's simple math really. When you go from a user base of hundreds to a user base of 10's of thousands, you are bound to discover a number of bugs that were previously undiscovered.
Click to expand...


;) Yeah, just ask MSFT - they let every PC user beta test for them ;)
 
TigerPRO said:
It seems to always happen after Apple releases an upgrade to Mac OS X: the Apple support forums will be filled to the gills with critical bugs galore. My comment is that this seems to be a poor pattern with new software releases from Apple. In other words they seemed rushed most of the time. Because I seem to remember certain major issues about Panther's initial exhibition; FileVault to name one example.

My question is, how do the developers feel about how solid Tiger is in it's latter stages compared to what Panther was. Is it better, worse, or about the same? My worry is with such a huge update, that we will see the greatest number of problems ever. Because it seems no matter how hard all these beta testers work at ironing out bugs, there is always a large group of people reporting huge problems after installing it. Why is that?
Click to expand...

In addition, it is not so much a question of how healthy is Tiger, but how healthy is the system people are putting Tiger on. If there issues that are left unresolved on the system from the previous update, don't expect them to magically be solved by Tiger. Many people make the mistake thinking that issues with their computer will disappear if they update their system. Unfortunately there are certain issues, which no amount of software updates will solve. They are among the following:

1. Corrupted cache files
2. Corrupted preference files
3. Corrupted fonts
4. Third party system enhancement utilities that are dependent on the code within the operating system remaining the same. Programs like those found on http://www.unsanity.com/ and http://www.resexcellence.com are especially suspect.
5. Peripherals that never got proper firmware updates to speak correctly to Apple's own specs.
6. Bad memory. RAM can go bad at anytime.
7. Bad power manager.
8. Clock battery needs replacement.
9. System firmware needs updating. This is a biggy. Someone updating from 10.1.5 or earler to Tiger directly will have to take heed of these firmware updates:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86117

Apply them while booted into Mac OS 9, or face a blank videoscreen that can only be reverted if they have external display support or swap out the motherboard for one with an updated firmware. Apple's 10.2 and later installer disks themselves don't always detect old firmware before corrupting the system. Apple's software update won't always tell you if you need a newer firmware update.


10. The directory may be damaged, and that is what is slowing your system down:

http://www.macmaps.com/directoryfaq.html

The important thing to recognize is when doing any update, follow these procedures on Mac OS X:

http://www.macmaps.com/upgradefaq.html

And you should avoid having problems. Those who don't follow those procedures are the most likely to have problems.
 
topgunn said:
It's simple math really. When you go from a user base of hundreds to a user base of 10's of thousands, you are bound to discover a number of bugs that were previously undiscovered.
Click to expand...

Good point. Yet there is still such a thing as sloppy coding. You shouldn't need to beta test to weed out every bug. To an extend, good programming can eliminate many problems from the start. I view beta testing as a means of finding "unantisipated conflicts between functions". But the better you are at antisipating those, the less you need to go back and patch them up later. You're absolutely right that more users will always reveal more problems, I'm just pointing out that it's possible to have good solid software without needing to beta test and stumble into every bug. Good development can solve problems without needing to experience them.
 
TigerPRO said:
Good point. Yet there is still such a thing as sloppy coding. You shouldn't need to beta test to weed out every bug. To an extend, good programming can eliminate many problems from the start. I view beta testing as a means of finding "unantisipated conflicts between functions". But the better you are at antisipating those, the less you need to go back and patch them up later. You're absolutely right that more users will always reveal more problems, I'm just pointing out that it's possible to have good solid software without needing to beta test and stumble into every bug. Good development can solve problems without needing to experience them.
Click to expand...

You are right, a good Software Engineering Process can eliminate many unnecessary defects. But...no Software Engineer would ever say that a good process doesn't require much testing (I'm not implying you said this, I'm just clarifying). In fact, a good Software Engineering Process will require more testing than someone just programming. Software Engineers know that defects (defects is the SE term, not bugs) are impossible to totally eliminate and maintenance is the largest part of the life cycle of software.
 
BWhaler said:
My understanding is the latest seed is solid with one major (known) bug.

I think Tiger is going to be fantastic and solid. People in the forums have been a little harsh lately, imho.
Click to expand...

What is this major "known" Bug :confused:
 
BWhaler said:
The current disk image doesn't install on 14" iBooks.
Click to expand...
It's only some models of the 14" from what I read. And I hope people remember this information is about a prelease version of Tiger.

Remember when you are dealing with a released version of Tiger you need to forget about all the different beta bugs as they all should have been fixed by the time it's released.

Of course that doesn't prevent the released version of Tiger from having its own set of bugs.

Hey Moderator(s): Maybe all the threads about bugs and info that is not correct in the released version of Tiger should be marked aas pre-release info and locked so people coming alng after Tiger is released won't get confused. (Yeah sure. I know some people will ignore anything but what they want to see.)
 
gopher said:
In addition, it is not so much a question of how healthy is Tiger, but how healthy is the system people are putting Tiger on. If there issues that are left unresolved on the system from the previous update, don't expect them to magically be solved by Tiger. Many people make the mistake thinking that issues with their computer will disappear if they update their system. Unfortunately there are certain issues, which no amount of software updates will solve. They are among the following:

1. Corrupted cache files
2. Corrupted preference files
3. Corrupted fonts
4. Third party system enhancement utilities that are dependent on the code within the operating system remaining the same. Programs like those found on http://www.unsanity.com/ and http://www.resexcellence.com are especially suspect.
5. Peripherals that never got proper firmware updates to speak correctly to Apple's own specs.
Click to expand...

In your opinion, is it possible that something could be done within Mac OS X to prevent these things from happening, or at least detect and fix them automatically?

I know what you mean about Firewire firmware, because I had some serious issues involving an external hard drive. But my only observation and complaint would be, even when problems with external peripherals occur, they should not bring down the whole system. For example, my issue happened when I plugged two particular firewire devices into the system at the same time. But even when I disconnected them, OS X would still remain "wacky" as if it couldn't just let go and forget the problem. Even to the point where I couldn't shut down the computer without using the power button.

That's always been one of the key differeneces between Windows and OS X, that when something doesn't work, the system won't lock up because it isn't prepared to deal with things not working. However I think Mac OS X is starting to need more refinement in this area.
 
TigerPRO said:
In your opinion, is it possible that something could be done within Mac OS X to prevent these things from happening, or at least detect and fix them automatically?
Click to expand...
In my opinion, a lot of the caches should be cleaned out on a major OS upgrade anyway. A lot of stuff has changed, so a lot of the caches would be invalid anyway.
 
ct77 said:
screensaver400 said:
All in all, it feels a lot like the Windows XP machine I switched from...
Click to expand...
Yuck. :eek:

You're not serious, are you? ;)
Click to expand...

Yes, I am, stability-wise. Considering that I had a pretty well maintained XP machine, not some Slickdeals Dell POS. Remember, 95% of people live with Windows every day. I don't think its much of an insult to call a pre-release version of an OS that is 2 builds old comparable to an OS that has been out for 4 years and through two service packs.
 
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