Ancestors

Toot

Written by Zack Weinberg on 2025-01-25 at 18:42

result of a solid week of hacking on $sideproject: I now know that one particular bug is definitely not in one particular file

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Descendants

Written by Zack Weinberg on 2025-01-25 at 19:02

of course it was a two-character editing mistake in a part of the code that I wasn't paying any attention to

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Written by Zack Weinberg on 2025-01-25 at 19:08

this is an example of a general principle relevant to all kinds of debugging: the longer you have spent hunting the bug, the more likely it is to turn out to be caused by a tiny, tiny mistake and/or a part of the code you're not looking at.

this is for the same reason that it's easy to not notice typos in natural language text: if you're reading at full speed, your brain is liable to substitute what ought to be there for what is there before that chunk of text reaches your conscious attention.

so don't beat yourself up when this happens to you, ok?

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Written by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) on 2025-01-25 at 19:04

@zwol

Sigh. Well of course; if your consciousness expanded until you were paying attention to every little detail everywhere, you'd never have bugs.

How to achieve something more realistic is part of the quest.

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Written by nomad :verified_pride: on 2025-01-25 at 19:07

@zwol You mean it wasn't DNS??!??!??!

But it's always DNS!

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Written by Zack Weinberg on 2025-01-25 at 19:10

@nomad It can't be DNS. The program has nothing to do with DNS. Or networking at all, even.

[narrator, over ominously swelling background music: "but as we all know from bitter experience, that doesn't mean it can't be DNS"]

[but seriously in this case it really can't]

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Written by Bj�rn on 2025-01-25 at 19:18

@zwol I spent days debugging a problem which was caused by an XML configuration being out of sync with an Enum. A few hours in I said: The cause of this must be trivial. But trivial does not mean easy to find.

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