May, 17, 2007 archives

sorry for things being so boring around here. i’ve been grinding away at bugs at work. after gaining some ground on bugs in connector/odbc, i’m being reassigned to help out with some server bugs again, at least part-time.

fixing bugs in c/odbc is an adventure. the code base bears the scars of several different developers of varying levels of cleverness and somewhat conflicting coding styles. but now that the test suite is in shape, it is easier (and safer) to do some more mechanical transformations to undo some of the damage.

one problem with tackling bugs in an odbc driver is that a lot of the reports involve third-party applications like microsoft access or crystal reports, or development tools like delphi that we don’t have as much expertise in. the initial reports often don’t include all of the information we need to be able to reproduce the bug.

this can be frustrating both for us and the reporters — we just don’t have enough people looking at c/odbc bugs to play around with every application to figure out exactly how to reproduce bugs that are reported, and often the problem seems blindingly obvious when you’re the one who runs across it. i think that most of the time we get it under control, but there have been a few times when this frustration has taken things in the wrong direction.