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It would be very nice if we could share or clone our development environment and let contributors on Stackoverflow play with it, rather than try to reproduce on

by rgovind 13y ago

It would be very nice if we could share or clone our development environment and let contributors on Stackoverflow play with it, rather than try to reproduce on their computers. Of course it has its dangers, but once solved, it would be an awesome addition to SO.

davyjones 13y ago
This is the exact goal of vagrant. The toolset is already in place. I just wish more people use it while filing issues.
peeters 13y ago
I agree it would be cool, and occasionally useful, but I think overall such a tool would be a negative. The goal of boiling down code to the smallest, most portable example which demonstrates the problem isn't just to get more effective help. It's a vital step in isolating the issue, and when duly used, often results in the problem being found without help. Furthermore, it gives answers the quality of being more useful to those who find the question later. That's because while two actual pieces of code that have the same bug will appear almost unrelated, their simplest reductions will bear similarity to each other. I think adoption of a tool that just lets one share their dev environment would discourage this sort of due diligence, and encourage the useless "here's a dump of my code please fix it"-type questions.
jader201 13y ago
At first, I thought you were being flippant, but then I realized in horror that you were serious. While I know you were coming from a good place -- I'm all about automating a testable problem (i.e. TDD, write failing tests first), and I think in the right hands, this would be a nice tool -- I could only see SO using this to further enforce strict requirements in what they consider a "valid" question. "You must set up a lab environment that fully replicates the issue in question." Maybe they wouldn't let it go that far (I would hope), but I think it would head in that direction.
specialist 13y ago
I see jsfiddle.net being used this way for jQuery, plugins, themes, etc. While I really hate doing HTML + CSS + JS work, the outgrowth of jsfiddle and the like is brilliant.

by rgovind 13y ago

davyjones 13y ago

This is the exact goal of vagrant. The toolset is already in place. I just wish more people use it while filing issues.

peeters 13y ago

I agree it would be cool, and occasionally useful, but I think overall such a tool would be a negative. The goal of boiling down code to the smallest, most portable example which demonstrates the problem isn't just to get more effective help. It's a vital step in isolating the issue, and when duly used, often results in the problem being found without help. Furthermore, it gives answers the quality of being more useful to those who find the question later. That's because while two actual pieces of code that have the same bug will appear almost unrelated, their simplest reductions will bear similarity to each other. I think adoption of a tool that just lets one share their dev environment would discourage this sort of due diligence, and encourage the useless "here's a dump of my code please fix it"-type questions.

jader201 13y ago

At first, I thought you were being flippant, but then I realized in horror that you were serious. While I know you were coming from a good place -- I'm all about automating a testable problem (i.e. TDD, write failing tests first), and I think in the right hands, this would be a nice tool -- I could only see SO using this to further enforce strict requirements in what they consider a "valid" question. "You must set up a lab environment that fully replicates the issue in question." Maybe they wouldn't let it go that far (I would hope), but I think it would head in that direction.

specialist 13y ago

I see jsfiddle.net being used this way for jQuery, plugins, themes, etc. While I really hate doing HTML + CSS + JS work, the outgrowth of jsfiddle and the like is brilliant.