Contents page

Index (83KB)

workaround


workaround: n. 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."