On 23/07/2014 07:14 AM, Anthony D. Baye wrote:
> I hope you find these as amusing as I did.

I see somebody's been reading the hacker jargon file, then...

We had a catastrophic heisenbug the other week. When you run the 
application, if you click on one of the settings on the configuration 
page, it actually *runs* the action being configured, rather than just 
changing the setting. Utterly mystified as to how such a bizarre thing 
could even be remotely possible, we waded through the code. No hint of 
what might cause such a thing. So we ran a debug build of the program... 
and the bug vanished.

Much poking, and it turns out that if you run the version of the 
software produced by the automated build system, the bug is completely 
repeatable. If you build the software (in debug or release mode) 
yourself, it works perfectly. What the actual hell??

When we actually found the root cause, it was truly horrifying. It seems 
that the automated code obfuscation system we run our code through is 
BREAKING OUR CODE!!! O_O The "solution" was to turn off code obfuscation 
in certain parts of the program. I say "solution" since this obviously 
isn't a solution at all; the fact that this event occurred at all proves 
that the obfuscater is defective, and that another bug like this could 
occur AT ANY MOMENT. It's also provably impossible to test for, since 
the obfuscater is also rewriting our tests, and it might rewrite the 
test case correctly but the production code incorrectly. So... yeah, 
pretty worrying, actually.

Also: Technically it's not a bug unless it's in Hemiptera.

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