How to find: Other Squeak bugs to fix

Peace Jerome peace_the_dreamer at yahoo.com
Thu May 18 02:44:42 UTC 2006


Hi Duncan,

Lets see, I think I have several directions of advice.

My usual squeak projects start out with an personal
interest and a notion that:

"Well I SHOULD be able to ..."
 
Then as I look into things I find bugs,
  ( and as I look at the bugs I find more bugs.)
 
Report them first as complaints.
  (Good reports = a simple reproducible recipe to
demostrate the essence of the bug.)
 
Then later add to them my analysis from looking into
them more closely.
   (I started to describe this process then realized
that is a whole 'nuther story)

Add a solution to them
  (which may not work the first time.)

Test the solution.
  (This is not a sunit test its more like a go/no-go
test. Coming up with these tests can be as exacting as
coming up with a solution but they are vital to the
process.) They prove that the solution works to my
satisfaction.
  A good test will test the boarders of the problem,
like throwing things at a trash can with two of them
on the screen.

Finally having a fix that 'works'.
 
And Publishing it (I like to use mantis reports
because of their focus and persistence.)

And patiently, patiently waiting for someone who can
change the image to notice.


=====

If you want to look at my reports
Go to the view issues page.
Set reporter to 'wiz'.
And I suggest setting Hide Status to 'none'. This
allows seeing the closed reports too.

You can see by example how I make a report and add to
it. And how long one has to be patient some times for
attention. (I think very highly of Marcus Denker for
noticing.)

If you find something you can make a useful
contribution to, please chime in. I believe keen
observation and analysis is useful. Often fixes get
developed because someone provides a clue that turns
out to be a vital missing piece of information to
someone else.

For me bug hiking thru squeak is a fun and useful way
to increase mastery of squeak. I look forward to our
future collaborations.

Yours in service,

Jerome Peace (wiz)

P.S. I've sent a copy of this to squeak-dev. Lets see
if we can hook a few other good bug fixers.
 

 


 

--- Duncan Mak <duncan_mak at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello Jerome,
> 
> I had a lot of fun working on the TrashCanMorph bug,
> but I'm just starting on hacking on Squeak, and
> would like to get some pointers from you.
> 
> I've been trying to find more bugs to fix; one that
> I've identified as 'attackable' by me is
> http://bugs.impara.de/view.php?id=3082, which turns
> out to be a bug in a String primitive. John McIntosh
> is working on it, I guess it's a bit too hard for me
> now.
> 
> Do you have other bugs that you know of that needs
> fixing? I've been browsing thru Mantis, and can't
> really come up with anything that seems to suit.
> 
> For now, I've noticed that the WindowSwitcher
> behavior is broken in 3.9.7032 (Alt-w); I'll be
> trying to fix that.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Duncan.
> 
> 
> 


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