Xaprb

Bug reports can be fun. They can also be terrible. Either way they can be entertaining. On the Drizzle IRC channel today I saw a couple references to MySQL bug reports: it is stop working and Does not make toast (which reminds me of the Mozilla bug report about the kitchen sink). Got any other favourites¹?

¹ This one’s for Jay.

I think I’m going to adopt a policy of not replying to posts to mailing lists that end with blurbs such as the following.

The information contained in this mail is solely property of the sender’s organization. This mail communication is confidential. Recipients named above are obligated to maintain secrecy and are not permitted to disclose the contents of this communication to others. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the originator of the message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender.

I can make the excuse that my lawyers won’t let me because they are trying to understand the legal ramifications of responding to a message on a public mailing list with a disclaimer like that. Nothing shorts out a lawyer’s circuits like trying to understand the risks of engaging with another person’s risky behavior after accepting a disclaimer about said behavior.

I wish someone could at least invent a shorter disclaimer. Seriously — wouldn’t a few words do just as well? How about this:

This email is confidential and proprietary. Do not disclose to third parties.

Or even better, how about this:

I’m a moron. Thank you for ignoring me.

If you’re like me, you’ve gotten tired of writing endless test cases for parsers that can understand the thousands of variations of text output by SHOW INNODB STATUS. I’ve decided to solve this issue once and for all by patching MySQL and InnoDB to output XML, the universal markup format, so tools can understand and manipulate it easily. Here’s a sample snippet:

<status><![CDATA[
=====================================
100320 15:46:24 INNODB MONITOR OUTPUT
=====================================
... text omitted, but you get the idea ...
]]>
</status>

PS: Yes, this is a late April Fool’s joke.