On 9/12/07, Jim Smith jsmith@wate.com wrote:
I know I was being vague. I was trying to ask the question in general terms so that I would know how to handle all bugs, rather than the specific one I'm dealing with now. Though I'd love to have help on the specific bug I'm dealing with, I know that only a few people might have knowledge about the module that has the bug. However, many people deal with debugging scripts everyday, and that's why I was looking for some strategies to best track down and fix bugs.
I think that's a great question and respect you for asking it.
I wrote this handbook page over a year ago: http://drupal.org/node/73179 HOWTO: Make A GOOD issue report
I'd say that your issue report lacks a good title, and (more importantly) simple steps to repeat the issue.
Reading your issue I imagine it would take me a few hours to repeat the bug. Then once I repeated it fixing it might take 10 minutes. This seems like a bad ratio
I suggest that you create a test Drupal installation on a development server (or your local desktop) and then take as few steps as possible until the problem happens again. Then do it again with slightly different settings until you can isolate the exact conditions that cause it. Record those steps in the issue starting with "Install Drupal" and ending with "Condition X happens and I'd like it to be condition Y".
Once you've done that it will be easy (or easier) to fix the problem and the module maintainer will be more likely to fix the problem.
Another potentially useful document (after you've improved the issue itself) is the page on "Getting a Bug Fixed Sooner" http://drupal.org/node/73178
Regards, Greg
PS Did you reapply the patch after upgrading to drupal5?