There Really is No Substitute for Documentation
This afternoon I'm onto another problem with The Broker, and this time it's really difficult to figure out because there have been a lot of changes made to the codebase, and none of them are documented in the least. The problems include the immeditate unregistration of services after they have been registered, as well as not accurately identifying those services that aren't available to the client.
I think I was getting close to the answer, but the erlang code is just too functional, and it's hard to know where something is called from if you don't have a complete stack trace. In this case, I don't - or at least don't recognize it if I do. I'm about a 5 or 6 out of 10 in erlang, and that's not enough to really be able to dig all this out of the code without some form of documentation to help me know what role each module plays in the overall scheme of things.
In the end, I was able to document what I saw, what I think the problems were, and how I'd go about fixing them, and sent that off to the guy who wrote all the code and is far far better at erlang than I am. I'll have to wait and see for tomorrow when he returns.