A bug report is sometimes entertaining either because of the personalities involved or because of the bug itself. Here are a collection of links into public bug trackers; I learned about most of these in a recent Twitter thread.
- GCC’s magnum opus, its War and Peace, is Bug 323: optimized code gives strange floating point result. With a 15 year history and 90 duplicates, this bug shows how badly wrong things can go when the compiler gets caught between a dubious standard and the weird x87.
- Another classic from GCC is Bug 30475: assert(int+100 > int) optimized away
- Bug 56888: memcpy implementation optimized as a call to memcpy is about the compiler doing what modern compilers do best: straddling the line between clever and idiotic
- In Ubuntu Bug 255161 our intrepid heroes solve the mysterious inability to print on a Tuesday
- Ulrich “this is no place to get a free education” Drepper was the source of much consternation during the time that he maintained glibc. Bug 12701: scanf accepts non-matching input shows him in fine form.
- RedHat Bug 1202858: restarting testing build of squid results in deleting all files in hard-drive
- Similarly, steam-for-linux issue 3671 illustrates the importance of sanitizing arguments passed to rm -rf.
- Jesse Ruderman provides this glimpse into the lighter side of Mozilla’s bug tracker including:
- Ubuntu Bug 1310292: installing `ruby2.0` results in ruby 1.9.3-p484 as default version makes you wonder what people are thinking
I hope you enjoy these as much as I do. Thanks to everyone who contributed links.
Updates from comments and Reddit:
- Angular Bug 5017: Unit tests fail when run in Australia
- Bumblebee 1.4.31 had a small problem
- MySQL Bug 20786 eventually got a birthday party
- Ubuntu Bug 1 is
still unfixedfixed due to Android - Chromium Issue 31482: Huge amount of goats teleported and Issue 125981: The fundamental error in the icon of cheeseburger — as far as I know the locale-aware sandwich icon tragically remains unimplemented
14 responses to “Classic Bug Reports”
When Mozilla’s Bugzilla picked up the ability to have shared bug searches, I started a list of Fun bugs that has some entertaining entries. Most not in the sense of reports of “interesting” things, mostly just joke bugs of various sorts. Might be entertaining nonetheless. 🙂
Jeff can you check that WP didn’t mangle your link? I’m getting “The search named Fun bugs does not exist.”
The list is missing the following classic:
https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commit/a047be85247755cdbe0acce6f1dafc8beb84f2ac
While this isn’t the original bug report, but the commit which resolves it, this is pretty noteworthy because of the hilarious comment thread which ensued.
This one might also be worthy of your consideration:
«Unit tests fail when run in australia»
https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/5017
Thanks eigengrau, those are great!
I think you should include ubuntu’s first bug which I consider a piece of history in itself:Â https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
another one is Ubuntu bug #1
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
Best Chromium bug: http://crbug.com/31482
Also decent: http://crbug.com/125981
While not a public bug tracker, it is publically documented with a lengthy explanation and apology from the developer in question. The commercial game ‘Eve online’ rendered my (and others) windows installation unbootable by accidentally deleteing the boot loader’s configuration file C:\boot.ini instead of their own installer’s boot.ini.
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/about-the-boot.ini-issue/
There was a famous GHC (Haskell compiler) bug, where the compiler would delete the user’s source program file if it found a type error. I don’t know a tracker url for it, but it has become legendary. Talk about a language that doesn’t coddle the weak :).
Oh, oops — I have the search shared only with users with “editbugs”, I think because I didn’t want it shared with people who hadn’t shown a modicum of responsibility in terms of not piling on bugs with useless comments. 🙂 (Not that comments on most of these bugs would be particularly useful, either — just that when it comes to commenting on joke bugs, a sort of judiciousness is desirable.)
Here’s an exported form of the buglist as it currently exists — won’t be updated as new fun bugs come in, but it’s good for a snapshot-in-time at least.
Don’t forget this wonderful saga.
Thanks for the updates, folks!
One of my favourite bug reports can be found in the book “Debugging” by Dave Agans, where a video encoder would suddenly slow down whenever the person who was trying to debug it had a certain shirt on. I don’t have the book in my office so I can’t provide any more details than that though.