most important information about bugs

[Christoph]

In an effort to write fewer bugs, I'm going to start a journal of all bugs in all the programs I write. That way, when I perplex myself, I can go back and look at similar bugs I've found and fixed.
However, it's going to be in a physical book and I don't want to switch the format midstream. I want to come up with a format that will give me as much useful information as possible and that will make that information as easy to find as possible.

Ex:

symptoms: crashes when searching my test box for config files
date: 10-10-1999
lang: BASIC
project: rootkit project 0.5a
purpose: provide difficult-to-detect backdoor access
purpose of broken code: look through /etc and ~/.* for interesting config files
bug: potential buffer overflow and execution of arbitrary code for files with very long names
reason for bug: I assumed that filenames would be of reasonable length.
fix: check filename length
complexity of fix: simple
severity: moderate
time to find, isolate and fix: 4 days
how you found the bug: searched for any interaction with the filesystem


edit: Thanks deRussett
edit2: added a couple more

 

[deRusett]

you might want to list what the project does, unless that is listed in another book,

projectrootkit project 0.5a
function find interesting config files, blah blah blah

 

[Smartweb]

use some sort of database. all that in a text file would be hard to find.

 

[XWRed1]

You are writing a rootkit for *nix machines in basic?

 

[Christoph]

You are writing a rootkit for *nix machines in basic?

Ph34r m3.

Not really. I just wanted to pick a ridiculous example.

 

[Titan386]

Oh good, I was scared there for a second

On a serious note, this is a good idea. I too have found myself making the same mistakes over and over, but hopefully if I were to actually record them, I would be able to cut down on the amount of future errors. Or maybe I'll just start making new ones...

 

[Christoph]

That's it. I'm starting now. I just spent way too much time tracking down a bug that looked like this:
printf("employee #%s\\'s name is %s.\n",workers->id,workers->name);
when it should have looked like this:
printf("employee #%d\\'s name is %s.\n",workers->id,workers->name);

Not only that, but I made the same mistake yesterday.