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Re: problem revealed by issue #2398 (server-side assertion)

From: Garrett Rooney <rooneg_at_electricjellyfish.net>
Date: 2006-02-14 02:22:20 CET

On 2/13/06, Stuart Celarier <SCelarier@corillian.com> wrote:
> Garrett wrote:
> >Why change from an assert to a SVN_ERR? The assert was wrong because
> >of the pointer comparison, not because of what it's testing, it's
> >still fundamentally misusing the API to pass two different filesystems
> >to this function, so why not make it an assert?
>
> Yes, the pointer comparison was wrong, but aborting the server because
> of a recoverable error condition is also wrong. Recovery, in this case,
> would mean letting the calling operation can fail gracefully.
>
> With all due respect, what value is provided by aborting the server? I
> don't see that restarting the server after it has aborted corrects the
> situation. So why abort in the first place? How is that better than
> failing the operation?

So by your argument no code that can ever be used in a server process
can use assert? Sorry, I don't buy that, not by a long shot. The
point of the assert is to keep the developers from misusing the API,
and to make it abundantly clear when the problem does crop up that
this is WRONG and needs to be FIXED. It does so by making it
impossible to ignore the issue, and the result is that the code
actually does get fixed as opposed to ignoring the problem. This is a
good thing, IMO.

-garrett

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Received on Tue Feb 14 02:22:50 2006

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