Also, I find Gruber’s and your argument about “the record that Flash has” to be very curious. Essentially, the argument that Flash Player is known to be buggy, so therefore it shouldn’t be updated? It seems to me that’s the opposite of what should happen.

Again, we’re not talking about a major update to Flash Player, for example from 9 to 10, but simply a fix for one security bug. Although I should say, for many users who upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, they were automatically and unknowingly upgraded from Flash Player 9 to 10 by Apple. The automatic upgrade from Flash 9 to Flash 10 also occurred in Leopard via Security Update 2009-005, even to those users who had already installed Flash Player 9.0.246.

You can place the blame for it wherever you want, but expecting something different is not rational.

I’m not sure the way the discussion is going makes sense. (Withdraw the GM) Rather I think there’s a deeper issue of what to do if a serious flaw is found after disks are on the shelves. While Apple has been lucky there is the chance of something happening ala many XP installs where systems are compromised within minutes of being installed if older media is used.

The solution just has to be to make a security update check as part of the installation process. The fact Apple doesn’t do this is worrisome.

1. Seed the release candidate to developers
2. Tell developers that it’s a release candidate
3. If no show-stopping bugs are found, tell developers that the release candidate is GM
4. Tell developers the release date
5. Tell consumers the release date

Unfortunately, Apple skipped steps 2 through 4. Indeed, at no point prior to or even on August 28 did Apple ever tell us that 10A432 was either a release candidate or the GM.

“If Apple had already declared build 10A432 the GM before seeding it to developers for testing, that would be completely irresponsible [...].”

This is true if the sole purpose of developer seeds is to discover bugs in the seed that might be showstoppers. But there is another purpose, which is to allow developers to make sure their apps can be ready to ship when the OS does go GM, whenever that may be.

I think your point that “Apple could have un-declared it GM” still stands. From our point of view 10A432 would just have been another seed that turned out not to be GM. Even if they had told us it *was* GM, they could have un-GMed it.

I’m also a developer and publisher of Mac software. Are you?

But by all means, continue with your armchair commentary.

Does anyone want a broken Adobe Flash in a GM or (worse) corruptions or instabilities introduced elsewhere in the environment? Having been in (many) these discussions for OS-level release work (not at Apple), and a conservative engineering development practice (usually) carries these decisions. Experience has led me to be skeptical around claims of entirely isolated and modular code, too.

After the realization that a fix is not going into the GM is grokked, the discussion then (usually) becomes “and how quickly can the fix be tested and made available?” And “will we have systemic risks or exposures in the wild prior to that?”

The whole GM discussion here is somewhat of a canard, too. An SL Server software licensing fix didn’t make the GM, after all. The better question is “when is the fix going to be tested and available?” Faster is better. Faster and unstable is worse. And you can only go as fast here as you have staff for and testing coverage for. But a GM? That’s substantially more than a vehicle for a fix.

Load ClickToFlash, and move on.

I got sick and tired of his relentless pro-Apple fanboyism, his snide personal attacks, and the one-sided nature of his ruthless commentary.

it comes as no surprise whatsoever that Gruber would automatically take Apple’s position on the Flash issue.

1. Even if Apple did not manage to ship the latest version of Flash with their OS install, most of the ‘outrage’ seemed to be about the X.6 updater _downgrading_ the installed version. It should be hard to find a parallel universe in which that makes sense.

2. What exactly do people think that Apple do in terms of quality control that they couldn’t manage to achieve within a week? Even in their own code there are plenty of untested areas and if you’re using non-English localisations it is blatantly obvious that Apple consider it perfectly acceptable to sell software which hasn’t even been looked at (by a human who is awake and speaks the language), so what exactly will they do with the Flash plug-in before shipping it.

Of course, in the days of ClickToFlash, the practical relevance of this seems negligible. It would be interesting to read what people commented had Apple not shipped Flash at all with their OS.