Taking the inspiration of Valeriy Kravchuk great series of blog posts “Fun with Bugs” (and not http://funwithbugs.com/ which is about both caring for and eating bugs), and since I recently went and run Coverity against Drizzle, I thought I’d have a small series of posts on bugs that it has found (and I’ve fixed).
An idea that has been pervasive in the Drizzle project (and one that I rather subscribe to) is that there is two types of correct: correct and obviously correct. Being obviously correct is much, much better than merely being correct.
The first category of problems that Coverity found was kind of interesting, there was a warning that data_file_name and index_file_name in class ha_myisam weren’t initialized in the ha_myisam constructor nor in any function that it calls. It turns out that this was basically because the code wasn’t exactly optimal, and these variables were used kind of oddly. In fact, in writing this blog post I went back and found that there’s a bunch of extra dead code and these should just be removed, along with the code that “used” them.
The historical use for data_file_name and index_file_name were that (in MySQL) you could specify different paths for MyISAM data and index files, so that the FRM ended up in the server datadir, the data file ended up some other place and the index file was off behind the sofa. Since MyISAM is used only for temporary tables in Drizzle, this is entirely not needed.
Another place where a similar bug was found by Coverity was in the SQLExecutor class of the json_server plugin. The _err variable wasn’t initialized in the constructor. After some careful auditing, I think this was actually a false positive as it was set to something before being used, but it was pretty simple to prevent future bugs by initializing it.
Two instances of the same warning, one just found a bunch of code to delete (rather useful) and the other is rather minor but may help someone in the future.
Coming up next: total embarrassment bugs.