zlacker

> The kind of bugs where you can invest days and have nothing really to show for it except crossing out some suspicions.

Me, with zero C/C++ experience, being asked to figure out why the newer version of the Linux kernel is randomly crash-panicking after getting cross-compiled for a custom hardware box.

("He's familiar with the the build-system scripts, so he can see what changed.")

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I spent weeks of testing slightly different code-versions, different compile settings, different kconfig options, knocking out particular drivers, waiting for recompiles and walking back and forth to reboot the machine, and generally puzzling over extremely obscure and shifting error traces... And guess what? The new kernel was fine.

What was not fine were some long-standing hexadecimal arguments to the hypervisor, which had been memory-corrupting a spot in all kernels we'd ever loaded. It just happened to be that the newer compiles shifted bytes around so that something very important was in the blast zone.

Anyway, that's how 3 weeks of frustrating work can turn into a 2-character change.

>>Terr_+(OP)
Personally these can be the best bugs though because you have an opportunity to learn something new (your work environment is everything though). Compare that to a ticket in an older codebase with hard multi-cause bugs that are just painful to debug and leave you with nothing but a deeper understanding of something that is slipping into irrelevance by the day.

>>belval+td
"I found the bug, but it's because the business process you want to model is fundamentally insane and you're asking the computer to do magic."

>>Terr_+(OP)
How did your character change?

>>Terr_+Rf
In my experience, administrative process that was previously done by a bunch of administrative assistants and then "computerized" around the year 2000.

The original stakeholders are long gone, the system is too valuable to be replaced and each quirk handles specific cases that are not documented anywhere. Bonus point if it's in a semi-dead language like VBScript. Please fix.

>>action+In
One evil-twin goatee, one villainous laugh.

>>Terr_+Rf
I'm going to frame this and put it on my wall.

>>Terr_+(OP)
I once ran into a bug that only happened in a specific version of the linux kernel when combined with a specific version of the java JDK, worse 2-3 weeks of troubleshooting of my life.

We found an issue in the kernel bug tracking that seems to explain it, but we never confirmed for sure. Fortunately updating either of those things fixed the issue. This was of course also hard because this was back in the golden days of vmware managed by client's IT team, so getting them to update things on a VM was hell as well.