Is there an issue tracker for already reported Mathematica bugs?

To answer your question, no, there is no publicly facing bug tracker sponsored by Wolfram. I have also reported several bugs to support. In order to prepare a bug report that doesn't lead to several iterations, I have found it useful to send a screencast of what I was doing. This is irrefutable.

Of course, there are pro's and con's to a bug tracker. I'm torn between the "search through the previously-reported bugs to see if mine is there" and "just report it to technical support" and even if they've heard it a million times, it's no skin off their back. (Unlike an open source system, where you might be wasting volunteer's time if you reported a duplicate bug.)

I dunno. With a system this large, powerful, and cross-platform, there will be bugs. Even if the system runs 99.99% correct, due to the size of the system, the 0.01% of bugs might be appear large in magnitude.

Having a public list of bugs, some real, but many to most user error, may be seen to tarnish Mathematica's image as a trustworthy platform. As a writer of ad hoc software, I have a lot of tolerance for code with bugs. But in the commercial arena, image is everything; and, there will be a vociferous group of intolerant folks who will point to the bug tracker, hence damaging the brand. If I were WRI, I would not sponsor this because in the end, it's just not worth it.


Since Stephen Wolfram announced it publicly in his keynote talk at the WTC 2019, I feel it is OK to finally share this:

This year, Wolfram started to have an open bug tracker. At the moment, it's only accessible to prerelease testers, but my hope is that this will change in the future so that it is possible for dedicated Mathematica users to get access to the system.

I spoke up many times in favour of this in our chat and even compiled a dedicated blog post. But let me be clear: this would not have been possible without dedicated people within the Wolfram dev-team, who stepped up for this idea, promoted it and set up the system. And I'm certain that this would not have happened if we, our community, wouldn't have nurtured such a good relationship with employees from WRI. Thank you all for that!

But what changes if only prerelease testers have access? The answer is that there are high-rep users here who are also pre-release testers and when questions pop up, that are clearly bugs in the system, we can test it, discuss it with WRI developers and bring it directly into the bug-tracker. If and how we can report back needs to be clarified. In any case, it is a big step in the right direction.

Again, thank you all for your support.


I completely agree with halirutan about the worth of a bug tracker system for Mathematica, it is something very useful for developers like us, which spend almost every day on Mathematica.

In my experience (about 20 years) of Mathematica's evangelism, I met very few people which were negatively influenced by bugs. Generally speaking, who works with software knows that all software, really all, has some kind of bug or wrong behavior. Moreover, consider that if you are going to make an investment on a software, in terms of know-how more than on the licenses, you should be aware of any problem influencing the area of application you intend to use the software for. On the other hand, even if you know there is a bug in a specific context you will never use, this will not influence your decision. So, in any case the makers of that software should be happy of that, because you can decide without being fooled by the limited information about their product. In other terms, a serious tracker system can help people who already works with Mathematica and help other to decide if the software is suitable or not for them.

Of course, stupid people will always speak against the software or the company (Wolfram), starting from a bug or even from a negative comment here on SE, this is inevitable with or without the bug tracker system.

What I would suggest is to use the same professionality used here on SE, that means trying to keep a good and serious level of comments and try to be focused on the actual problem and avoid unuseful comments about why a bug is there or why Wolfram doesn't remove that bug. We cannot know how complex is the internal process of a software house producing a huge software like Mathematica, so there could be thousands of reasons why a bug is not fixed when we wish.

On the other hand, the tracker system will save a lots of our time, allowing us to be aware of a bug and avoid to spend time trying the correction of something wrong that doesn't depends upon our code. Finally, another positive aspect is that with the contribution of the SE community, a bug can be easily overcome by workarounds suggested by expert users, so even beginners will take advantage, also appreciating the versatility of Mathematica, that allows many different ways to obtain the same result.

Finally, another possibility could be to create something with limited access only to those having a good reputation as SE users, so to limit the possibility of a misuse of the bug's list and related comments. Personally, I don't like closed groups, but considering we are discussing critical aspects of a commercial software, this could be a sort of compromise to show our professional intention to contribute to the software development and to its adoption and not to damage it or the its makers. Not sure this is possible, but could be a starting point.

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Bugs