I fixed a bug in yum

Well, it was a tiny syntax error in Fedora 17 alpha. For some reason Presto had a tiny typo where a hyphen/minus “-” was used instead of an underscore “_”. The full traceback allowed me to get the file and line number where the error was. I just visually scanned the surrounding code to see what could be wrong. That’s when I realized that replacing the unary minus with the underscore would solve the problem. I made the change and ran su -c 'yum update' again and the problem had been resolved. So a big win for the technologies and people involved.

A win for Python because I was able to make a change in the source and then run the code without having to know about or go through the linking, compiling, executing process.

A win for open source because I was able to view and modify the source code.

A win for Fedora because they are using Python, which made it so easy for me to fix a tiny bug without breaking updates for me.

I’d also like to add that I needed to do something similar for work. Something was broken and I had to read through some Ruby files. Although the syntax didn’t make too much sense to me, I was able to judge what changes I needed to make. I made them and worked around some bugs until they could be fixed. So hooray for Ruby as well.