Still an Open Source Virgin

I was setting up Cruise Control the other day and trying to figure out why it wasn't working on a certain source control folder. I noticed a strange error in the cruise control log about there being an invalid character in the path, so I decided to take advantage of the fact that it is an open source project and download the source code so I could step through it in the debugger and see what the exact problem was.

It wasn't long before I discovered the source of the error, which was a newline character embedded in the source control folder name. Since I am a vocal Visual Source Safe hater, I naturally assumed that the problem had to do with VSS data being corrupted so I scheduled some VSS maintenance and called it a day.

When VSS analyzer did not fix the problem, I took a closer look and realized that I had unfairly blamed VSS and the real problem was a bug in the Cruise Control code that parses out the output from the VSS command line tool (thank god PowerShell eliminates the need for much of this parsing voodoo). If the folder path in VSS is too long, then the command output wraps and Cruise Control incorrectly inserts a newline character inside the folder path.

The problem was easy enough to fix by stripping out the rogue newline character, so I recompiled Cruise Control, replaced the problem dll, and all was well in the world.

At that point, it occurred to me that other people must be running into this problem, so I decided to try being a good open source citizen for once and submit the bug fix. I had never tried this before, so I read the contribution procedures posted on the home page and followed their polite suggestions. I created a diff file of my fix, wrote up a detailed description of the problem, and even found a unit test that someone had commented out that failed under the current code base and worked with my fix.

I was just about ready to submit a JIRA ticket in their bug tracking system, when it occurred to me that I should probably browse the current VSS tickets first. It turns out that my issue was not only recorded in the system, but had just been marked as resolved by someone else the week before. Doh! I guess I should have tried that first, huh?

Oh well, at least I got practice going through the procedure for being an open source contributor. There are still an lots of open tickets for the current Cruise Control release, so perhaps I'll grab one of them while I have everything already set up.

After all, I don't want to be an open source virgin forever.
Posted on Tuesday, November 6, 2007 8:10 AM Software Development Practices , Becoming A Better Developer , Tools | Back to top