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Re: crash when fetching status

From: <kfogel_at_collab.net>
Date: 2004-11-05 17:00:45 CET

Jani Averbach <jaa@jaa.iki.fi> writes:
> Could we implement for 1.2 a new error code, e.g. "internal error", if
> and when we found these more? This way the user application could ask
> that the user write down / record everything what she/he has done, and
> report it back to the upstream. We won't crash but we also don't hide
> insidious bugs.

I'm not implacably opposed, but here are some reasons against it:

Returning error is not the same as failing an assertion or crashing.
The latter two are guaranteed to exit dramatically, right away. But
an error gets passed up the stack, and some caller higher up might
(bogusly) handle it gracefully and not error. Of course, that in
itself would be a bug, but of a particularly insidious type: it would
mask an impossible condiion further down in the call stack :-).

Also, even if the application asks the user to write everything down,
most people still won't -- the ones that would overlap heavily with
those who would write a real bug report even for a plain crash. So we
shouldn't assume the benefit of this change to be all that high, IMHO.

-Karl

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Received on Fri Nov 5 18:55:34 2004

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