An IanB-tastic day, or How A Bug Becomes a Fix

People don’t write enough about how they catch, report, and fix bugs. I hope others will follow my lead in exposing the process more.

1. Tried to read IanB’s revised webob tutorial at
   http://pythonpaste.org/webob/do-it-yourself.html …
2. where I got annoyed by how copying and pasting the code is hard
   with the “>>>” and “…” symbols. At the first example!
3. Since Python-Sphinx is the issue, spent some time in #python-docs
   discussing soluions with Taggnostr, including ones that other
   code highlighters use.
4. Thought about how IanB probably likes that the code isn’t just
   cut and pastable, since it typing it in yourself is much better for learning.
   Decided that I didn’t care!
5. Built on Taggnostr’s jquery-based fix on the installed
   doctools.js file.
6. Branched and checked out Sphinx from BitBucket to work on it
   it more formally…
7. where I promptly made a mess of things. I don’t know jquery or
   javascript very well, so there was a lot of fussing. The problem
   was that between my version and tip, underscore.js was added, so
   using the new doctools.js file in my generated sphinx html tree
   was causing some silent errors! Boy, JS seems to be hard to troubleshoot,
   and not very good at failing loudly!
8. After finishing my fixes, checked in the fix to BitBucked and pushed.
9. Made a pull-request, where I discovered that then you pull on your own
   branch at BB, it sends the request to you. This seems, hm…, unintuitive!
10. After asking about it at #mercurial who answered, and #bitbucket who didn’t,
    people agreed that this was, um, odd behaviour.
11. So, bug time at BitBucket, where after a search, I found Bug 681…
    (http://bitbucket.org/jespern/bitbucket/issue/681/master-repositories-dont-need-pull-request)
12. …which was filed by IanB!

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