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