Subject: Re: "special characters" and a problem
From: Robert Sievers (bob@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Mar 01 2000 - 11:03:55 CST
At 11:32 AM 3/1/00 +0100, Dick Kampman wrote:
>Another, reproducable, problem was the following: when I move the
>mousepointer in the left margin, the form of the mousepointer changes into
>a slant arrow. But at the first line of a paragraph it refuses to do so!
I want to use this example as a tutorial for all of you future bug writers
out there. The report is quite clear and quite accurate, yet if you were
to look for this problem yourself, you may or may not find it. (Try it and
see)
The next step in bug reporting, the step that I do, is isolation.
Isolation is a step beyond reproducibility; the art of identifying when a
bug happens, but also when it does not.
In this particular case, the mouse cursor doesn't change back to an arrow
only when the first character of a paragraph is a tab. In Dick's case, I
am guessing all of his paragraphs began with a tab for indentation
purposes, therefore a improper correlation was drawn. Now, since the bug
report was clear, factual, and specific, I was able to find it. Still, but
reporting is an art, and I wanted to share this with everyone so that it
could be learned from.
Since I took the time to use this bug report as an illustration, it will
probably turn out that my assessment isn't complete either. But in this
particular case, the extra information about the tab is likely to be the
critical piece of information that will allow the developers the clue
required to fix it.
In any event, this bug is now logged at #777
http://www.abisource.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=777
Robert Sievers
Open Source Evangelist
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