First usable 2.13.x experimental release?
Posted by kimmov on March 4, 2009
Few hours ago I released 2.13.4 experimental release. I hope this one is finally the first usable 2.13.x experimental release. Previous 2.13.x releases have each had some embarrassing (for me!) bugs. Of course I’m eating my own dog food and been using these releases. They are almost usable if one knows how to avoid those bugs and buggy features.
Perhaps the Most Embarrassing Bug I’ve been doing for a long time happened with 2.13.1. #2515875 “File->New” creates “disappeared” message in WinMerge 2.13.1. Funny (not really!) thing was that this bug was caused by my fix to another bug: #2493945 Crash if one of the diffed file was erased by another applic. And that bug happened because my (thousand times checked) saving code didn’t check if the file really existed… Do you see the pattern? From rare crash bug we ended up to making one of the most important features unusable. I’m always so proud when couple of hours after the release bug reports hit my inbox…
Sometimes I’m not sure which is more embarrassing, the fix for stupid bugs like these, or “thoroughly” tested fix that has funny side-effects.
The crash bug itself has been surviving few million users without reports until now. Which always begs the question if it really doesn’t happen for users or if they just don’t bother reporting it (as it is so rare). In this case I really hope it is the latter. As it is pretty easy to figure out situations when this happens. The simplest one being comparing files from removable media and then removing the media.
The only good thing is that my co-workers don’t see these bugs and mistakes… Oh, wait…
