Google Debugging

Here's something that happens to me fairly frequently, and I'm continually amazed that this works.

The other day I was building the Template Toolkit Perl module via CPAN. Anyone who has done this will recognize a snippet of the output of the test harness that all CPAN modules use:

t/factory.............ok
t/file................ok
t/fileline............ok
t/filter..............ok

only, in my case the "t/fileline" entry was most definitely NOT ok. It spewed out an error that made absolutely no sense to me. Something about template output not matching what was expected.

That's not the interesting thing: errors while building Perl modules happen all the time. What I find interesting is what I have found to be the most expedient way to fix this when it happens: I just Google the error message. in 60 seconds I had found the fix, pasted the new lines into the test file, and was rebuilding the module with no errors.

This isn't the most intellectual form of debugging, obviously. It entailed precisely zero real understanding of the problem on my part. I was just functioning as a patch-retrieval machine in this process. I suppose it can be argued that this is a bad thing, but let's face it: There are times when you just don't care why it's broken. You only want it fixed, and fixed now so you can move on. At times like that, I thank my stars that I can Google debug.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 12:22 PM  Permalink