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Realistically the printer probably caught fire under normal operations, then they went through everything that happened leading up to it, one step at a time, to figure out what caused it to catch fire. That is what let them submit a bug report with "this causes it to catch fire" rather than, "Printer caught fire randomly."

In the process of narrowing down which command did it, they demonstrated reproducibility.

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Yes, that's pretty much what I was picturing as well. Sorry if it didn't come through in the way I told the story.

But yeah, the part of this story that I love is that as someone who reads and triages a lot of bug reports, I'm always disappointed by how few people put in even the barest of efforts to reproduce and characterize a bug.

This person, on the other hand, spent the time and effort to reproduce a bug that would actually cause a fire, and characterize it well enough that it could be reproduced and fixed.

That’s not the definition of reproductivity.

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