Legendary

An epic tale of tracking down a very strange bug in the Mac version of the canonically nerdy typesetting tool LaTEX. Interesting to observe how debugging happens across a large open-source team without anyone designated as tester or QA.

(Stylistically, I find this to be a compelling use of the character-based narrative format for telling a testing story, a trope I find cloying in many software testing articles. Perhaps it succeeds because in this case the characters are real rather than obviously invented in service of the authorial point.)

For more context, MacTex’s full story of the font cache bug.

Start a discussion thread: