Bug Severity Guide

I have noticed some trends in how the “severity” field in Gnome’s Bugzilla is being
used at the initial bug reporting time. Basically, “enhancement” is being used mostly right (although it has little to do with severity) and the others can be interpreted
in the following way:

Blocker: It happened to me.

Critical: I do not know how I can go on living if
you do not drop everything in your hands and fix the cosmetic problem
I believe I am seeing. Right now.

Major: This might become a problem for me
at some point in the future.

Normal: I did not see the option when I filed the bug.

Minor: Rarely used.

Trivial: I saw it happen to someone else.

Now, if someone could please tell me why we let non-maintainers
set the “priority” field…

Binary Search

Miguel,
I am less impressed by that blog entry.

Let’s see… “In C this causes an array index out of bounds with unpredictable results.” Nope. In C it causes a signed integer overflow and hence unpredictable results. Consequently, casting the sum to unsigned will not fix it.

And if you are going to worry about overflow for one addition, why not
worry about overflow for the others? Line 10 and the subtraction on line 12 look safe, but
line 16 can overflow. That expression should be changed from
-(low + 1) to -low - 1. (I do not actually know if that is needed in Java, but in C it would be.)

Finally, the algorithm still does not work for sizes from 2^31 and up. To fix that, one would start working with unsigned quantities (thus solving the overflow problem as a side effect) and think of some other way of returning “not found”.