Comment Re:Honestly, when will people learn? (Score 1) 98
An acquaintance recently posted "Six Stages of Debugging" on his g+ page. (1. That can't happen, 2. That doesn't happen on my machine, 3. That shouldn't happen, 4. Why does that happen? 5. Oh, I see, and 6. How did that ever work). Doesn't an software dev who has been working for more than about three years go straight to No. 4?
Absolutely true for debugging. But there's a few steps you missed.
Somewhere near 3-4: Ok, how bad would it be if that happened? Does it recover without user intervention (i.e. service crashes and cron restarts it)? Does it recover with user intervention ("did you turn it off and back on?)? Does it lose user data (oh poop)?
The question here (which is altogether not trivial) is exactly this: "how bad would it be if we wrote an extra '\0' somewhere"? And what geohot did was answer that in the most productive way possible - by actually showing with a real example that the impact is major and permanent. If you aren't explicitly doing assessment of the impact of your bugs for schedule/priorities then you must be doing it implicitly somehow because most projects have more bugs than coders/time.
There's another step you missed, happens probably at step 10 or 11 and probably not by the developer that fixes the bug -- given the impact and the risk of the fix, when/how should this be deployed? Should it be backported to the stable releases? Do we have to ping everyone downstream? Is this so bad we should post on
Again, if you aren't doing this step explicitly, it's either happening implicitly or else you are just letting it land whenever/however.