On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 07:51:07PM -0600, Kyle Evans wrote:
! You seem to have misinterpreted this; he doesn't want to narrow it
! down to one bug, he wants simple steps that he can follow to reproduce
Maybe I did misinterpret, but then I don't really understand it.
I would suppose, when testing a proposed fix, the fact that it
does break under the exact same conditions as before, is all the
information needed at that point. Put in simple words: that it does
not work.
! any failure, preferably steps that can actually be followed by just
! about anyone and don't require immense amounts of setup time or
! additional hardware.
Engineering does not normally work that way.
I'll try to explain: when a bug is first encountered, it is necessary
to isolate it insofar that somebody who is knowledgeable of the code,
can actually reproduce it, in order to have a look at it and analyze
what causes the mis-happening.
If then a remedy is devised, and that does not work as expected, then
the flaw is in the analysis, and we just start over from there.
In fact, I would have expected somebody who is trying to fix such
kind of bug, to already have testing tools available and tell me
exactly which kind of data I might retrieve from the dumps.
The open question now is: am I the only one seeing these failures?
Might they be attributed to a faulty configuration or maybe hardware
issues or whatever?
We cannot know this, we can only watch out what happens at other
sites. And that is why I sent out all these backtraces - because they
appear weird and might be difficult to associate with this issue.
I don't think there is much more we can do at this point, unless we
were willing to actually look into the details.
Am I discouraging? Indeed, I think, engineering is discouraging by
it's very nature, and that's the fun of it: to overcome odds and
finally maybe make things better. And when we start to forget about
that, bad things begin to happen (anybody remember Apollo 13?).
But talking about disencouragement: I usually try to track down
defects I encounter, and, if possible, do a viable root-cause
analysis. I tended to be very willing to share the outcomes and. if
a solution arises, by all means make that get back into the code base;
but I found that even ready made patches for easy matters would
linger forever in the sendbug system without anybody caring, or, in
more complex cases where I would need some feedback from the original
writer, if only to clarify the purpose of some defaults or verify
than an approach is viable, that communication is very difficult to
establish. And that is what I would call disencouraging, and I for
my part have accepted to just leave the developers in their ivory
tower and tend to my own business.
cheerio,
PMc