this doesn’t surprise me. this happens to me so often, it should have a name, like Murphey’s Law or something.
often bugs are much more complex than they seem on the surface. when people first come in contact with a problem they make assumptions about how the bug works, where it exists – and those assumptions are just best guesses. often overly simple. and… they’re often wrong.
the key here is to remember that it’s a wiley bug that likes to hide – so whenever one of us sees it next, we need stop whatever we’re doing for 30 seconds, and just capture that whole environment as much as possible so that we can save it, rewind it, and replay it in slow motion inside a debugger – that way we can understand it completely, which is what’s required to fix it. that extra 30 seconds is always a hassle, but it saves sending a developer off for 3 or 4 hours chasing ghosts. i’m pretty used to it, it’s no big deal – and every experiment gives us some information – so it’s not worthless. but it’s still pretty frustrating to spend so long learning, building, testing, only to come up empty handed.
so what we don’t want to do is make assumptions about where this bug is, that just wastes time. and not just mine…
…think, if this stack does actually work fine in partials, think of how much extra work every user has had to do. instead of just dropping this stack in one partial and being done, they’ve had to copy and paste it to every page. what a bummer.
so, the next time you see it. just kind of pause for a second. do a save-as on your project. and maybe even grab a copy of your web-server directory. the droplet content (which might be part of the issue – who knows) is in a folder called droplets
.
and ask yourself… what was the last thing you did, what’s different about this situation? is the computer different? the server? the content? did you recently update RW or Stacks or one of the stacks on the page? is the page in an interesting location in the site hierarchy? does it have an interesting name? every detail is potentially useful info.
and with some teamwork, and a little luck, and a lot of patience – i think we’ll figure this one out. i’m pretty sure this bug is out there. i’m pretty sure we weren’t imaging it the last time you saw it. so it’s only a matter of time before it pops up again.
good luck at breaking Stacks.
Isaiah