Haunted by ancient history

Posted Jan 15, 2015 1:12 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Haunted by ancient history by dlang
Parent article: Haunted by ancient history

people remember things that break for them FAR more than they remember new features or speed. You need something way over 10:1 fix:break ratio to begin to have things break even (some people think this is over 100:1)

Exactly! I was just about to follow up and comment on how a recent SCSI breakage of mine was fixed nice and fast -- but then I realised that that 'recent' breakage was in 2013! But it still *felt* recent, because it broke the boot in a scary fashion.

One nice example of a good recent fix for me was a series of helpful responses, suggestions, and finally a quirk addition when my Simtec Entropy Key started spontaneously failing in 3.16, even though 3.17 had been out for some time and 3.18 was fairly close to release. This was a particular monster to track down because it was timing-related, intermittent, only happened after a reboot, and required physical removal of a USB device to fix. I think I rebooted 180-odd times in the process of bisecting, and had two or three wrong bisection paths due to mistaking bad commits for good ones. I couldn't ask anyone else to do this -- Entropy Keys aren't very common -- and it took me some weeks to find the time to do it, but once it was tracked down, a fix was almost immediate, even though Entropy Keys are not exactly the most crucial hardware ever, and I say that even though my firewall won't boot without its nice juicy random numbers. Now that's the right way to fix bugs! So bravo Johan! :)