It is said that children will say the darnedest things and it is true, but sometimes adults will too. I was working on a project and part of the new functionality that I was responsible for was not working as it should – sometimes that happens in software projects. While investigating a problem I was reading through a lot of different log files in an attempt to find out where things were going wrong.
I one of the log files I saw that Java had an exception due to a missing class. This means that the program had been compiled to use a certain widget class and it was complaining that for one reason or another it could not find this required class. From looking at the name it seemed that this class was probably involved in debug output which I where I saw the error.
I created an error ticket with the vendor who after a few days responded
“don’t worry, we don’t use that class”
Huh? I know that you do or did use this class as there was an error about it in the log file. I did also get confirmation that this wasn’t where our problem was. This vendor was a bit odd and every now and then I can almost see the following scene in their support group.
Support One of the users is complaining about class error MSG36302
Programmer Oh, we don’t use that thing any longer, it was replaced by the x76 ventiligator version 17.6 but only on Unix, Linux not on Mac OS or Windows … well since the upgrade to 7.3.02 anyhow.
Support Uh, what ?
Programmer Well, that’s an interesting case, if for some reason during the initialization of virtual state machine … 5 minutes more of this goes on … and that is why we had to upgrade to 7.3.03
Support I will just them them we don’t use that class
Programmer Close enough.