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Workaround

 
Hacker Slang: workaround

1. A temporary kluge used to bypass, mask, or otherwise avoid a bug or misfeature in some system. Theoretically, workarounds are always replaced by fixes; in practice, customers often find themselves living with workarounds for long periods of time. “The code died on NUL characters in the input, so I fixed it to interpret them as spaces.” “That's not a fix, that's a workaround!

2. A procedure to be employed by the user in order to do what some currently non-working feature should do. Hypothetical example: “Using META-F7 crashes the 4.43 build of Weemax, but as a workaround you can type CTRL-R, then SHIFT-F5, and delete the remaining cruft by hand.


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A workaround is a bypass of a recognized problem in a system. A workaround is typically a temporary fix that implies that a genuine solution to the problem is needed. Frequently workarounds are as creative as true solutions, involving outside the box thinking in their creation.

Typically they are considered brittle in that they will not respond well to further pressure from a system beyond the original design. In implementing a workaround it is important to flag the change so as to later implement a proper solution.

Placing pressure on a workaround may result in later failures in the system. For example, in computer programming workarounds are often used to address a problem in a library, such as an incorrect return value. When the library is changed, the workaround may break the overall program functionality, since it may expect the older, wrong behaviour from the library.

Workarounds can also be useful source of ideas for improvement in products or services [1].

See also

  1. ^ http://theanthroguys.com/2009/09/17/can%E2%80%99t-you-just-ask-people/

 
 

 

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Hacker Slang. The Jargon File. Copyright © 2007.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Workaround" Read more