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0 pointsajb1y ago0 comments

It's useful when the codebase is difficult to debug directly. Eg, your users have a bug that maybe appears on specific hardware, which the developers don't have. The users can't be expected to comprehend the code base enough to debug, but bisect is a mechanical process that they are capable of.

Having said that, bisect is also an O(log N) method and it's useful where otherwise you might end up spending O(N) time debugging something. I have myself split a configuration change into many stupidly-small commits (locally, without the intention to push that) purely so I could run bisect instead of manually reviewing the change to figure out which part broke stuff.

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sam_bristow1y ago

Git bisect is one of those tools that - once you learn how to use it effetively - fundamentally changes how you think about your git repos. I have had people tell me that a clean git history isn't worth the effort but once they really grok what you can do with that solid foundation really come around.

One case where git bisect really saved me was when we discovered a really subtle bug in an embedded project I was working on. I was able to write a 20 line shell script that built the code, flashed the device, ran 100 iterations of a check, and do some basic stats. I left the bisect chugging away over the weekend and came back to an innocuous-looking commit from 6 months earlier. We could've spent weeks trying to find the root cause without it.

8note1y ago

whats N here?

ajbOP1y ago

In the case of git bisect, the number of commits. In the alternate case, it depends what debugging strategy you decided to use.

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