Re:The Debugging Mindset
by aidos on Monday April 03, 2017 @04:08AM
(#14021275)
I recently fixed a bug in fontforge to do with extracting fonts when parsing pdfs. It took me a whole day because I didn't know what I was doing (haven't worked with C since Uni over 15 years ago).
Because I didn't think to look into using a debugger, I did it very much the hard way by adding trace statements all over the place to slowly narrow down the code path. I knew I was looking for something like that looked like an iteration typo, but it was a large unfamiliar codebase so it tok a long time.
Got there in the end! Probably 2 days of work start to finish for a 1 character fix. Classic.
I will definitely be starting by re-learning to use a step debugger in C next time I'm in the same position.
Because I didn't think to look into using a debugger, I did it very much the hard way by adding trace statements all over the place to slowly narrow down the code path. I knew I was looking for something like that looked like an iteration typo, but it was a large unfamiliar codebase so it tok a long time.
Got there in the end! Probably 2 days of work start to finish for a 1 character fix. Classic.
I will definitely be starting by re-learning to use a step debugger in C next time I'm in the same position.
https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/pull/3050/commits/e4b...