Am I going crazy?

[hazel]

No, listen, this is really weird. When I was preparing barbarella 2 for upload a couple of days ago, I found (to my horror) that it kept crashing. I traced the problem to one module which I replaced with the corresponding module from the earlier version and everything was OK.

Of course I wanted to find out what was causing the crashes (which hadn't happened under Etch). The problem seemed to be a bug right inside glib because I had syslog messages about it on the console. So I copied the module into two files - dubious_configfile.c and good_configfile.c so that I could compile with each of them in turn and do some comparative tests. For example, I ran strace for both of them and compared the output.

Today I booted up to carry out some further tests and whaddyaknow? Both those files were gone!. There was no dubious_configfile.c, there was no good_configfile.c, there was only configfile.c (it was the good version actually but that's not the point). There is nobody else in the house who could have deleted those files.

Did I imagine it all? But I still have the strace outputs and the /var/log/messages file with the glib error messages.

Did I walk in my sleep, switch on the computer and delete those files? I checked messages and there was no bootup between 10:00 last night and 3:25 this afternoon.

Either the pixies removed those files or the Good Lord did it because He knew I was getting obsessed with the whole business. Or I'm going crazy.

[elija]

Were they in temporary directory or on currently unmounted media?

[hazel]

Were they in temporary directory?

I think the truth must be something like that. I wasn't in /tmp but I was certainly working in a sandbox directory which I had created for the purpose. And this morning, having slept on it, I recalled a very tenuous memory of deleting that directory before shutting down for the night. It was 10:00, I was exhausted - you know how it is when you are programming, you lose all track of time. I now think that probably my only copy of the dubious config file module was in that directory. I certainly remember removing it from the real barbarella directory and replacing it with a safe version earlier in the evening.

No great harm was done but now I will always wonder if I could have found out what was wrong. I keep thinking of extra tests I could have done. And I have learned that it is a bad idea to work on a computer towards bedtime.