Saturday, October 01, 2016

Everything is broken

This week was I suppose fairly typical. Started using a new library, the excellent sqlg that provides the TinkerPop graph API on top of relational databases. Found a bug pretty quickly. Off we go to contribute to another open source project, good for my street cred I suppose. Let’s fork it, and open the source code in IDEA (Community edition). After years of hearing abuse about Eclipse, I’m now trying to use “the best IDE ever” (say all the fan boys) instead. Well, that didn’t go so well, apparently importing a Maven project and resolving the dependencies proves too much for IDEA. I fought with it for a while, then gave up.

Fired up Eclipse, it opened and built the sqlg projects without a hitch. Wrote a test, fixed the bug, raised a PR, got it accepted with a thank you, life is good.

Then I find another bug. Except that upon investigation, it’s not in sqlg, it’s in the actual TinkerPop code. The generics on a map are wrong, there are values that are not instances of the key class (thanks generics type erasure!). So I can fix by changing the method signature, or change the keys. Both will break existing code. Sigh…

Oh, and the TinkerPop project doesn’t build in Eclipse. The Eclipse compiler chokes on some Java 8 code. Off to the Eclipse bug tracker. Maybe I need to have three different Java IDEs to be able to handle all the projects I may find bugs in.


Everything isbroken. Off I go to my own code to add my own bugs.