Mercurial: The Definitive Guide by Bryan O'Sullivan

Author:Bryan O'Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: COMPUTERS / Software Development & Engineering / Tools
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published: 2009-06-15T23:00:00+00:00

Beware Interference Between Bugs

It’s possible that your search for one bug could be disrupted by the presence of another. For example, let’s say your software crashes at revision 100, and worked correctly at revision 50. Unknown to you, someone else introduced a different crashing bug at revision 60, and fixed it at revision 80. This could distort your results in one of several ways.

It is possible that this other bug completely “masks” yours, which is to say that it occurs before your bug has a chance to manifest itself. If you can’t avoid that other bug (for example, it prevents your project from building), and so can’t tell whether your bug is present in a particular changeset, the hg bisect command cannot help you directly. Instead, you can mark a changeset as untested by running hg bisect --skip.

A different problem could arise if your test for a bug’s presence is not specific enough. If you check for “my program crashes,” then both your crashing bug and an unrelated crashing bug that masks it will look like the same thing, and mislead hg bisect.

Another useful situation in which to use hg bisect --skip is if you can’t test a revision because your project was in a broken and hence untestable state at that revision, perhaps because someone checked in a change that prevented the project from building.

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