Two year old bug in Android | Hacker News Reader

Two year old bug in Android

servletsuite.blogspot.ru

7 pointsabava14 comments

That is a feature request, not a bug.

Missing features and don't working features are equal in user's eyes.

That doesn't change the definition of "bug", though.

Definition from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug ):

>A software bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways.

So lack of support for common standard is unexpected and reason for it could be flaw or mistake.

Also http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/bug_3

> a mistake or problem in a computer program

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bug?s=t

>a defect or imperfection, as in a mechanical device, computer program, or plan; glitch

Imperfection!

Geez.. you deliberately take some words of an article and totally ignore the primary defining words in your own pasted text which is "error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault". Also, it is absuletely not unexpected or an incorrect result when it's not even implemented. It's intended by the programmer not to work and it's your own wish that it should work. It's definitely not a fault in the program code that it doesn't cope with the URI. It was never intended to do that.

It would be a bug if there is code for that URI scheme and the browser/OS should handle that, but doesn't. So if you can point me to the code in Android or some other hint that the scheme should work, i'll agree with you and call it a bug :)

Rest assured that arguing that a bug and a feature request are the same thing will not help on HackerNews. You can try that elsewhere :)

Is it really so bad that this SMS URI scheme wasn't implemented?

To me it looks like another potential security vulnerability that could be abused by malicious websites.

Therefore I'm quite happy that this "feature" is missing ;)

It does not send SMS automatically. Just open SMS client

Yes, I know. If they implement it properly it's alright.

But my concern is that a it might get a security vulnerability when a nifty hacker finds a way to automatically submit the SMS.

And in my opinion omitting the feature is the best way to avoid that problem.

There's an argument that this COULD be a platform feature, but it would be fairly simple to write an Android app that provides an IntentHandler for the SMS scheme. I'd never actually come across that particular URL scheme used anywhere: iOS/Apple clearly have it though.

This alligator seems a little closer to the boat, why don't we take care of it first? HTTP Authentication

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1353

Here is another 2 yr old bug that I just ran into this week. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=14924

Here you have a 4 year old "bug" aka enhancement:

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1030&...

If Android team doesn't see this as a potential feature, they should at the least close the bug, just letting it rot does not align with the goal of having a bug tracker.

Bug or not, there are far more important things to work on then this (like IMAP Idle support in the standard client).

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