← Back to context

Comment by groestl

8 days ago

> a long-standing bug was accidentally fixed

In some cases (e.g. in our case) long standing bugs become part of the API that customers rely on.

5 comments

groestl

Reply
strbean  8 days ago

It's nearly guaranteed, even if it is just because customers had to work around the bug in such a way that their flow now breaks when the bug is gone.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1172/

  • thaumasiotes  7 days ago

    That comic doesn't show someone working around a bug in such a way that their flow breaks when the bug is gone. It shows them incorporating a bug into their workflow for purposes of causing the bug to occur.

    It isn't actually possible for fixing a bug to break a workaround. The point of a workaround is that you're not doing the thing that's broken; when that thing is fixed, your flow won't be affected, because you weren't doing it anyway.

    • strbean  1 day ago

      It might be as simple as a property name containing a typo, and the workaround being to expect that incorrectly spelled property name. When the typo is fixed, the code that was expecting the misspelled property breaks.

      Maybe it's a bad workaround, but your users will almost certainly implement bad workarounds.

    • dllthomas  2 days ago

      > It isn't actually possible for fixing a bug to break a workaround.

      That's not true. For instance, if there's a bug in formatting, that might be worked around by handing the unintended formatting. But now you're (maybe) not handling the intended formatting, and a fix would break you.