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If nothing else, git bisect allows any user[0] to find when a bug they are experiencing was introduced to the codebase. They do not need to be familiar with th
by Cogito 14y ago
If nothing else, git bisect allows any user[0] to find when a bug they are experiencing was introduced to the codebase.
They do not need to be familiar with the code, the language, that module, the library, the developer or have anything more than the knowledge of how to check out/bisect the code base, and how to reproduce the bug.
For this it is an invaluable tool, and I can't count the number of times on the git mailing list that a simple bug report has allowed a developer to quickly locate the exact commit an issue was introduced and investigate further. A recent example is at [1].
[0] Here a user refers to any of 'technical user', 'developer', 'maintainer', 'original author', or really anyone who has the ability to check out the repository.
[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/215045/focus=215078 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/21504...
- nossralf 14y agoThis idea can be extended even further, to users who do not know how to (or cannot) build the software in question. One example of this is mozregressionfinder [1] that was created by Heather Arthur [2]. The tool automatically downloads Firefox nightly builds (in the same binary search pattern of bisect) and lets the user check for the bug they observed in each version. Once the nightly build where the bug was introduced is found, a Mercurial pushlog URL is displayed which can then be pasted into a bug report to aid developers in chasing down the bug. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/mozregression https://github.com/mozilla/mozregression [2] http://harthur.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/mozregression-update/ http://harthur.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/mozregression-update...