How does one successfully open a Java bug if Sun doesn't respond?

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!

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.

No such EMail yet. I just got the acknowledgment that the bug was received and would be internally reviewed.

Eddie 2009-01-27 02:36:56

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 2009-01-27 02:40:29

That's all I'm trying to determine! :) I'll try that.

Eddie 2009-01-27 02:43:45

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 2009-01-27 02:47:34

Well, I guess you could recheck the bug database and submit a fresh report.

Zach Scrivena 2009-01-27 03:40:08

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 2009-01-27 13:28:23

@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 2009-01-28 02:57:14

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 2009-01-27 02:36:10

@Joshua can you provide more details on the one they "sat forever" on?

matt b 2009-01-27 02:48:28

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 2009-01-28 04:37:58

It's possible to submit patches even for Java 6? For Java 7 I know it's possible.

Eddie 2009-01-28 02:57:52

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 2009-01-29 03:40:30

@Alan M: Ah, I didn't know that they would accept patches before Java was opened sourced. Thanks.

Eddie 2009-02-11 20:19:30

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 2009-04-09 21:01:18

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How does one successfully open a Java bug if Sun doesn't respond?

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