Will Dean wrote:
> At 13:20 08/02/2005 +0100, you wrote:
>> Speaking as one of those early-adopters, I can tell you that I will
>> disable the new cache as soon as I see explorer crash because of it.
>
> Oh, blimey. Just disable it now for all I care.
Whoa! We want as many testers as we can muster, so we _do_ care. In
particular we want users with old & slow PCs to tell us about effects
that will never show up on your blindingly fast PC. And those same users
may suffer more pain from a crash than you do in terms of waiting for
Windows to pick itself up.
> I'm afraid I don't see that crashing Explorer is a particularly big
> deal,
> and I'm not sure what kind of data loss you're referring to (unless
> you've just rearranged your desktop icons, which I agree is an
> annoyance.)
Maybe it is as much a fear of the unknown as anything. No, subversion
should _never_ lose any data due to an explorer crash, so it is not
serious in that respect. But you could get into a crash loop which is
harder to break for someone who is less adept than you are.
> That said, I don't think the new cache has ever crashed
> Explorer for anyone, has it?
Not yet, but that's not to say that it won't at some point in the
future. The last few emails in this thread have demonstrated how easy it
is for you and Stefan to misread each other's code. It could be Stefan
adding code that causes a crash.
>> So, yes, the bugs must be found rather than silently ignored, but
>> the way to do this should *not* be a crash. Why not show a popup
>> when it happens? or write to some log file?
>
> Feel free to submit a patch...
>
>> Finding bugs by explicitly *not* preventing explorer crashes comes
>> across as a big "fuck you" to everyone using nightlies, but that may
>> just be my perception of things.
>
> Nobody could accuse me of not caring about the stability of TSVN.
Nobody doubts your commitment, or the huge improvements you have made.
But you do seem to be taking a piece of defensive programming in the
shell extension as an attack on the quality of the cache code.
> I do not believe that the long term stability or quality of the
> product is served by catch(...) blocks, particularly when their role
> is to conceal bugs in other parts of the same application.
No debate there, bugs should not be concealed. But nor should they be
allowed to cause an explorer crash. The catch(...) would be OK if it
threw out a warning rather than silently hoovering up the evidence.
> 1. I still think it centres on a fix to a bug which didn't exist.
> 2. AFAIK, the bug-which-I-don't-think-existed never caused anyone's
> shell to crash.
Whether this particular bug exists or might cause a crash is almost
irrelevant. There is no reason not to provide a safety net to prevent
future or as-yet-undiscovered bugs from creating havoc, provided that it
exposes the bug instead of masking it.
Simon
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@tortoisesvn.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@tortoisesvn.tigris.org
Received on Tue Feb 8 14:45:41 2005