Great article. Even with these tips in mind, it's not always easy. I've seen:

- environment variables changing the behavior of the program

- load-dependent pthreads issues (can't reproduce on unloaded dev machine)

- shell scripts silently failing to do important things (liking kill off the old processes; but there's a check to not spawn if it's already running)

- config files that looked fine (realize that there's a case sensitivity issue in 1 out of 5 of the config files)

> - environment variables changing the behavior of the program

But have you seen them abused as "additional" parameters to a function? putenv() by the caller, getenv() by the callee, rejoice!

It's important to keep in mind that monkey patching a given application is not only never easy but also never a good long term solution to a given bug - unless you like the open source application so much you'd to become one of its maintainers.

The simplest patches also the best. Fixing a single configuration option that is just not provided is the simplest and best monkey patch. Dealing with any logic will get scary over time.

Excellent article. The ksplice fellows are extraordinary hackers w/ good practice!

I saw that "0 reboots" and had to go check them out. Wouldn't you know, it's free for Ubuntu Destop!

- http://www.ksplice.com/pricing

Great stuff. More like this, please.

This other ksplice article was fascinating in how it went from command line to object code to memory addresses.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1458147