Trying to figure out what's broken when someone reports a bug can sometimes be one of the biggest pains for a software developer. Helpful information can be few and far between and it could be a lot better. Ralph Schindler has a new post to his blog today to show how you can create a good, helpful reproduction script that can make the live of the project's developers much simpler.

"There is a problem with component Fooey-Bar-Bazzy, I think it's related to Nanny-Nanny-Neener. Please Fix Now." If you've written a bug/issue report like that in the past with no other details - shame on you! This may come as a shock, but as great as some developers might be, they cannot read minds.

He recommends a few things that can help make your report clearer - listing out your assumptions, creating a short use case, documentation on expected and actual results and how to make the script as generic as possible. To further illustrate, he also includes a sample reproduction script for a Zend Framework bug based on this issue with plenty of commenting, reproduction code and setup/assertion methods to show where the problem lies.

Using this method does not only make it easier for the developers to find the bug, but it also means that the person finding the bug doesn't have to know the internals of the application to point out where the issue lies.

Often times developers only think about tracking the bugs in the code for their "real jobs" and don't worry about issues that might pop up in their personal projects. Brandon Savage suggests that they should both be important and that not tracking bugs on your personal projects can be a bad thing for the quality of your code.

Too often, it seems like these development practices are abandoned, especially with regards to the use of a bug tracker. I know I have personally been guilty of failing to use a bug tracker, even though I use things like Subversion and develop specifications. It's easy to forget, but important to remember.

He lists five reasons why you should use a bug tracker for your personal development:

• Our minds are imperfect repositories of information.
• Bad development practices can form.
• It makes it harder to force ourselves to use bug trackers for private paying clients.
• Predicting time to completion becomes more difficult.
• Seeing progress being made is that much more difficult.

If you haven't gotten a chance to participate in one of the Zend Framework Bug Hunt Days, you can get up and running pretty easily with this guide from Padraic Brady that introduces you to the concept and includes a few helpful hints to keep in mind when you participate.

Every month, the Zend Framework now holds a Bug Hunt, a period of about two days (usually a Thursay and Friday after the middle of the month) when everyone in the community is invited to assist in resolving (or reporting) issues to the Zend Framework Issue Tracker. The next event will occur this week on Thursday 19th and Friday 20th November - so there's no time like the present to get yourself familiar with the process.

He looks at why the developers chose to go with a bug hunt (to help make the framework better for everyone, the work needs to be done on a larger scale) and why your should take part in an event. He shares some tips on getting started - visiting the IRC channel, using the issue tracker, ask questions and a few others. Be sure to check out the last part of the post for his helpful tips on where to go from here.

Paul Reinheimer came across a small bug in a recent PHP 5.2.x release of the language - a debugging message left in by mistake.

If you get an error when PHP launches along the lines of: "PHP Warning: PHP Startup: mm_create(0, /var/www/phpSessionStorage/session_mm_cli1000) failed, err mm:core: failed to open semaphore file (Permission denied) in Unknown on line 0" you're going to either need to upgrade to PHP 5.3.0 or wait for PHP 5.2.12.

It seems that some debugging code made it into the core code (but it's been corrected in the branches).

The PEAR blog has pointed out some issues that the latest Ubuntu release (Karmic) can cause with a typical PEAR installation:

Be aware that the initial release of Ubuntu Karmic contains a bug that affects PHP and PEAR, whose fix came a tad too late to make the initial release. The bug is fixed, and will be included in upcoming updates from Ubuntu. [...] The bug causes some zlib functions to be unavailable to PHP, and the Archive_Tar code will silently fail due to this.

Until the update gets pushed out into the updated releases, you can use the "-Z" option on any package installs or upgrades you might do in your PEAR installation.

In a new post to his blog Michelangelo van Dam reminds developers everywhere about the Zend Framework "Bug Hunt Day" effort to make the framework an even better tool to develop applications.

Last week Thursday the start was given to Zend Framework's Bughuntday and it turned out to be a huge success, as mentioned by Chief Architect Matthew Weier O'Phinney on Zend's DevZone website. Over a hunderd bugs were squashed leading up to the release of Zend Framework 1.9.3.

He talks a bit about what the goal of the Bug Hunt Days are all about and a few ways you can help by closing out some of the bugs marked open in the Issue Tracker.

Padraic Brady has pointed out the announcement starting a Zend Framework event - the monthly Bug Hunt (two days of effort to reduce the number of bugs in the popular framework).

As Matthew announced during the week on the mailing lists, Zend are sponsoring a two-day Bug Hunt every month starting today. And there will be prizes for those who solve lots of issues!

Matthew Weier O'Phinney made the announcement to the main Zend Framework mailing list about the twice-monthly event bringing together ZF staffers with those wanting to help make the Framework better. Prizes include t-shirts and Zend Studio licenses. For complete information on how you can get involved and where to start, check out the full message from Matthew

David Parra has a suggestion for PHP developers out there - it might be beneficial to learn some C so you know what's going on.

I think most of the people using PHP wonder from time to time about particular behavior of the language. [...] But lately I stumbled over a nice one. It looked like a bug in PHP, but turns out to be an interesting, curious, part of the C-language.

He gives an example of a case where an error message (as a result of E_ALL error reporting) shows evaluation of certain variables in a different order than anticipated. As it turns out, the difference was in the order of the parameters in the C code of PHP (different on SPARC versus x86 systems).

Matthew Turland has ammended a previous technique he suggested about using a centralized set of plugin loaders for Zend_Form elements (part of the Zend Framework) because of an issue it can cause with the Zend_Loader_Plugin.

The bug entails Zend_Loader_PluginLoader allowing multiple instances of the same path to be added per prefix. This becomes an issue because of how Zend_Form handles adding subforms. [...] If both the form and subform are using the same plugin loaders, the bug causes the same paths to be added multiple times.

As of the posting of this article, the issue has not been corrected. The solution is outlined in the description of the bug if you want to correct the problem yourself until the full patch is included.

The latest version in the PHP 5.2.x series has been released - PHP 5.2.9 - with several bug and stability fixes. From the announcement:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 50 bug fixes, several of which are security related.All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Four security enhancements/fixes are specifically mentioned - a problem with imagerotate, a crash that can happen when extracting zip files, a problem with explode and empty strings and a segfault in json_decode. The full Changelog is here.

You can get the latest download from the downloads page on the PHP.net site (or your favorite mirror).