Would you please, please, please, PLEASE quit trying to tell me what the problem is? Just tell me what's wrong; what's not working for you; what symptoms you're seeing. Use the bug report formula. Don't decide what is causing the problem and then tell me that, because you're almost certainly wrong about what the problem is. (And a great many other things too, it would seem.)
(This is actually a variant of the issue identified in "How do I use X to do Y?".
There was a good riff on the XY problem on Perlmonks: XY Problem.
Also, for those inclined to tell you what the problem is, perhaps you should encourage them to write it as a test file. At least that way you get something useful to work with.
Re:More on XY
jdavidb on 2006-04-26T14:21:55
I didn't even realize "the XY problem" had become a standard term for it. (Or that there was a better source about it to point to, within the Perl community rather than without. But knowing how things are, I should not be surprised.
:) ) I'd love to see test-driven bug reporting. Unfortunately that doesn't work in this case for a number of reasons. The primary reason in this case is that the problem is not with my code, but with theirs.
:) Other problems are that this is SQL, and that the users are effectively non-technical. For me, the bug report formula I linked to earlier is enough for me to get a test, or to discern when the issue is user error. As long as I can coerce people into actually providing all three pieces of information. In this case, what I got was the answer to #1: "What did you do?" I'm going to have to work out the answers on my own to #2: "What results did you get?" and #3: "What results were you supposed to get?"
