Re: Error handling in C

Richard Bos wrote:
lawrence.jones@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Richard Bos <raltbos@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A non-repeatable bug isn't a bug, it's a pilot error.

Attitudes like that are why we're saddled with unreliable, buggy
software. Undefined behavior isn't necessarily repeatable.

No, but there's a difference between "hard to repeat" and "cannot be
repeated".

Yes - "hard to repeat" is something that can be said about real world
bugs. "cannot be repeated" is something we'd like to be able to say,
but it is inherently impossible to collect enough sufficient data to
justify saying so. The simple fact that you could not reproduce a
problem reported by a user might be due to any of a number of
problems. It could be that your system differs from the user's system
in some subtle way that you are unaware of. It might depend upon time
or the environment in some way that was covered by none of your
attempts to reproduce the problem. It might be due to a communications
failure between you and the user (and keep in mind that this failure
might not be entirely the user's fault).

... I'd love to say that all bug reports are equally worthwhile,
but I've seen too many "bugs" which turned out to be the operator being,
for example, unable to read a simple instruction on the screen.

If you know that the problem was due to the operator being unable to
read a simple instruction, then the right diagnosis might be "operator
error", but it could also be "poorly written instruction". This is
particularly true if the instruction was written by the developer -
such instructions often assume that the user should understand as much
about the internals of the program as the developer does.
In neither case is "unrepeatable" an appropriate diagnosis.
.

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