[Python-Dev] Fuzzing the Python standard library

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 9:44 AM, Jussi Judin <jjudin+python at iki.fi> wrote:
> * Exceptions that are something else than the documented ones. These usually indicate an internal implementation issue. For example one would not expect an UnicodeDecodeError from netrc.netrc() function when the documentation[3] promises netrc.NetrcParseError and there is no way to pass properly sanitized file object to the netrc.netrc().

My main advice would be, before mass-filing bugs make sure that you
and the maintainers agree on what a bug is :-). For example, I can see
the argument that invalid encodings in netrc should be reported as
NetrcParseError, but there are also many APIs where it's normal to get
something like a TypeError even if that's not a documented exception,
and it's very annoying as a maintainer to suddenly get 20 bugs where
you don't even agree that they're bugs and just have to wade through
and close them all. Any assistance you can give with triaging and
prioritizing the bugs is also super helpful, since volunteer
maintainers aren't necessarily prepared for sudden influxes of issues.

In general this sounds like cool work, and help improving Python's
quality is always welcome. Just be careful that it's actually helpful
:-).

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org