Why are they calling it diff debugging?
They mention git (and only gitas a tool), so why not call it bisect like git does?
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
7 points (88.9% liked)
Git
2909 readers
1 users here now
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
Resources
Rules
- Follow programming.dev rules
- Be excellent to each other, no hostility towards users for any reason
- No spam of tools/companies/advertisements. It’s OK to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the community should not be self-promotion.
Git Logo by Jason Long is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
That's explained at the end (Revisions). Fowler is probably looking for a general term that can be used to describe this specific way of debugging. Since he is aware of git bisect (and I'm sure he knows about hg bisect) there must be a reason he is not preferring "bisect debugging," for example.
Edit: The term diff has a clear link with version control. bisect is not that obvious. It may be ambiguous/vague in debugging context. I would still call it "bisect debugging."
Because ultimately you look at the diff of changes, which significantly limits the amount of code you need to examine to find the bug (or at least something that uncovered the bug).