Changes

'''Oct. 03, 2006''' Discussed the project with dave humphrey. The gist of the discussion is: <vipers101> dave: I hereby present you, richard! <vipers101> richard: say something! <dave> pffft...way to play like a team <vipers101> I prefer to have my team share my griefs ...... <dave> let's assume you've got a program that used to work, but now it crashes. you'd like to figure out what changes to the code introduced the crash. you can programmatically test for the existence of the crash. so you want to have the computer go back in time and figure out what was the delta (e.g., changeset) where the crash started. you want to be able to isolate the problem down to a set of changes to a set of files. further if possible. let's say you have revisions 200 to 500, and you know the bug is caused by *something* in there. so you want to bisect your way through those changesets (in SVN each of those numbers is a changeset) until you can see where the bug was introduced <vipers101> dave: you mean the bugs are not introduced by the recent work? <dave> you don't know. you can't assume. maybe, maybe not. remember that working on a huge codebase means that there will be lots of changes going on around your work. so if you do a checkin, they take the weekend off, 50 other people could checkin before your next commit. what you need is a way to test for the problem (maybe a return code). then you need to be able to automatically pull and build the code, and run that test. wash, rinse, repeat <richard> if i get this, i can't assume that the user will already have a test case/function that returns pass/fail? <dave> right. you probably need to write something to figure this out. so a hung browser might mean you have a timer that watches for an event. or you might wait on a return code. a crash is probably easiest to test for. this is what I mean by writing a "wrapper". <vipers101> richard: I think we just have a new task list  '''Sept . 26, 2006''' * I read through your documentation here, and it is looking good. I also spoke to Shaver by phone this morning, and we chatted briefly about this project. He suggests that you start your work by looking for a suitable '''Crash Case''', one that happens reliably. Then you need at what would be necessary in order to bisect the change set (e.g., [http://www.mozilla.org/bonsai.html bonsai] data) in order to get closer to the change that introduced the bug. Shaver suggested that robc (Rob Campbell) might be a good person to help you brainstorm on this.