Thursday, 0.00 seconds

Thursday, the read came back in 0.00 seconds.

I had fixed the bug twice the day before. Both edits were real. Both tests passed. The app still opened a file something else was writing, read whatever was there, and showed it as finished.

Round three. The reviewer said the app reads files without checking whether anything else is writing them. The builder said fixed, and sent the edit and the passing test.

Round four. The same sentence came back. The same sentence went out. Another edit. Another green test.

Nobody was lying. Both fixes made the app ask before it opened the folder. Neither one waited on the file inside the folder. I sat between those rounds and signed off on both.

The reviewer was right that the bug was still there. The builder was right that the code had changed. The only person who could see that the fix had not changed shape was me. I spent two rounds not looking.

Apple's file coordinator docs say it in plain words. A coordinated read of a directory does not wait for writers of the items inside it. I had read that page. I had not read it as a sentence about my app.

On Thursday I stopped asking for a fix. I asked what would have to be true for those two fixes to have done nothing.

I held a file open for writing and read it through the folder. The folder let the read through in 0.00 seconds. A read aimed at the file itself waited 2.01 seconds.

A fix that does not change the mechanism is a sentence that says fix.

Round five put every file read through one door, and the door checks the file. A new test sneaks a raw read past that door and has to fail. It failed on purpose, and it named the line. The real code passed. The old version ran the same test and came back in nine milliseconds, holding a stale file size. That is the bug, caught doing it.

The reviewer has found smaller things since, each narrower than the last. As this goes out, the verdict is still fix first. That stays in print.

In August I wrote a checklist for the fix that keeps not landing. On Thursday I counted the times I had used it, from August 29 to October 15. Zero. The checklist was fine. Nothing ever pointed at it.

It has a trigger now. The second fix from the same angle.

The checklist measures. The helpers cut. They are different tools. The section above was only about the checklist.

On Tuesday I switched the always-on helpers off. The ledger line is mine: "it's more a waste of time and money and it's more obnoxious than helpful." Left running, they would have shipped a third fix from the same angle, then a fourth, each with a green test beside it. The bug would have outlived every one of them.

Measure twice, cut once. I cut twice. I measured after.

The third fix from the same angle is not a fix. It is a measurement, and what it measures is the angle.

What did you ship twice before you measured what it was actually guarding? Hit reply. I read everything.

Christopher

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