Fault tolerant programs and programmers

Archiveopteryx git head crashes a bit. Not every day, but some people reports that it crashes every week or month, at random times. Clearly there is a bug. Abhijit and I have discussed it and found a way to contain it, and I've written the code.

But I haven't found a way to push the fix to the master tree. I seem unable to commit and push that code. My soul wants to find the bug and fix it, not contain it.

Meanwhile, I had an appointment with the dentist this morning.

In the waiting room I read a fascinating blog post about a Chromium exploit. Sergey Glazunov, clearly an admirably clever hacker, stitched together fourteen bugs, quirks and missed hardening opportunities to form a critical exploit. The bugtracking information for one of the bugs shows that it was reported, discussed for a few days, then it was idle until Sergey leveraged it, and then it was fixed.

Chromium is a nice browser, and I appreciate the hardening and exploit resistance the team has added. I particularly appreciate the team's honesty: They run their pwnium contests and are frank about the results.

But now I am even less happy about making fault tolerant code. I feel that it may be mentally difficult to make a program tolerate faults and at the same time make a programmer not tolerate faults.