Year: 2011

Debugging with git bisect

Via Sebastian Bergmann’s blog I’ve learned about git bisect and how it can used for debugging.  Sebastian demonstrates the functionality together with PHPUnit.  I am a git newbie, so that was quite interesting for me.

git bisect can be used to find the change that introduced a bug. It does so by performing a binary search on the list of commits between a known good and a known bad state of the repository. A tool such as PHPUnit can be invoked at each step of the binary search to check whether or not the current state is broken.

Here is a shortcut on how to actually use it:

$ git bisect start
$ git bisect good someVersion
$ git bisect bad someOtherVersion
$ git bisect run someCommand -with SomeArgument

There are, of course, more resources online covering the feature.  I found this section of the Git Community Book helpful.  Hopefully, I’ll remember about it when I actually need it.

Day in brief

Japanese tragedy continued

Big Picture continues the series on Japanese disaster.  As on of the comments says:

It’s just incredible how tragedy is heaping upon tragedy – the earthquake, then tsunami, then reactor problems, volcano – and now frigid weather. Love and strength to the people of Japan – your grace through fire is an inspiration to all.

I’ve only seen scenes like this one in the movies about World War II and in post-apocalyptic video games.  This one is not a result of someone’s imagination.  It is actually how things are now, today, a mere 10,000 km from me.  Unbelievable.