Thursday, January 29, 2015

Apple Bug Reporting Tip: Always Capture a Sysdiagnose

While testing the 10.10.2 beta, I experienced a weird condition in Finder where commands in other apps like Show in Finder or Reveal in Finder would be ignored without error! I filed a bug report with Apple, and Developer Relations send back that it needed more information with this request:

Is this reproducible? If so, next time this happens, please take a sysdiagnose while the issue is happening. As soon as you experience the issue, press cntrl-opt-shift-cmd-period (⇧⌃⌘⌥-period)  (preferably with the finder in the foreground) and a sysdiagnose will be taken immediately (it can take a minute or two to complete). The sysdiagnose file should be revealed in a finder window. If you have to reboot, navigate to /private/var/tmp

That’s mostly boilerplate, but notice the preferably with finder in the foreground is specific to my issues.

I haven’t been able to reproduce this issue on 10.10.2 final yet, but the point is:

Always capture a sysdiagnose when weird stuff is happening in OS X that you want to report a bug on.