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Re: segfault at exit -- can anyone spot what I'm doing wrong?

From: Davyd McColl <davydm_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 06:39:53 +0200

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Hyrum K. Wright <
hyrum_wright_at_mail.utexas.edu> wrote:

>
> On May 27, 2009, at 3:24 PM, Davyd McColl wrote:
>
> Good day
>>
>> I have some C++ code which uses the svn_fs_* functions. I've noticed a bit
>> of an oddity, and I'm hoping that someone can just tell me that I'm
>> forgetting to do something. It seems that when I try to perform functions on
>> dirs or files in the repo, if I specify a path that doesn't exist in the
>> repo, I don't just get failure for the called function -- I also get a
>> segfault in apr_terminate() when the last call is made to apr_terminate()
>> (as I understand it, the last call in a stack of apr_initalize()[N]
>> apr_terminate()[N] is the one called...
>>
>> A simple code example:
>>
>> const char *szPath = "/";
>> apr_initialize();
>> apr_pool_t *pt = svn_pool_create(NULL);
>> svn_fs_initialize(pt);
>> svn_repos_t *repo;
>> svn_repos_open(&repo, argv[REPO_ARG], pt);
>> svn_fs_t *fs = svn_repos_fs(repo);
>> svn_fs_root_t *root;
>> svn_fs_revision_root(&root, fs, 1, pt);
>>
>> apr_pool_t *ptSub = svn_pool_create(pt);
>> apr_hash_t *hash;
>> svn_fs_dir_entries(&hash, root, szPath, ptSub);
>>
>> svn_pool_destroy(ptSub);
>> svn_pool_destroy(pt);
>> apr_terminate();
>> return 0;
>>
>> With szPath set to "/" as above, all works as expected and the application
>> exits cleanly. However, if szPath were set to a path not available in the
>> repo at the revision set (for example, if I set the path to "/foobar"), then
>> not only does the svn_fs_dir_entries() call fail (yes, I know I'm not
>> checking for the error here, but I know it does fail -- and I really
>> couldn't expect otherwise for a path not in the repo...), but when the time
>> comes for the apr_terminate() call, the application segfaults.
>>
>> I'm using subversion-1.6.1, compiled from source on my own machine with
>> Visual Studio 2008. I'm assuming that there's some crucial step that I'm
>> missing out in the code above and would dearly appreciate any constructive
>> thoughts on the problem
>>
>
> You've already named the crucial step you are missing: you aren't checking
> for errors.
>
> Subversion errors need to be checked for, and handled, if appropriate. By
> not handling any returned errors, you are effectively leaking the error
> memory for any error returned. To help ensure API users (include
> Subversion's own code) properly handle errors, Subversion is configured to
> crash on cleanup in debug mode if an error is left unhandled somewhere in
> the code. My guess is that this is what is happening to your code.
>
> If you are sure you want to ignore the returned errors, which I don't
> recommend, you can wrap each function which returns an error with a call to
> svn_error_clear().
>
> -Hyrum
>

I would have said "fair enough", but this code example above is a little
contrived for simplicity: in my real code, I do something more along the
lines of:

svn_error_t *err = svn_fs_dir_entries(&hash, root, szPath, ptSub);
if (err != SVN_NO_ERROR)
{
  // log the error and return from this caller level
}

In other words, I do have a kind of error handling which doesn't do anything
more in the logic of the program (just aborts the current logic whilst
logging an error), but which essentially ends up with the same code path as
above. Perhaps a better question then is: what *should* I be doing when the
dvn_fs_dir_entries() (or other svn_fs_* functions, for that matter), fail?
Is there some kind of invocation that I should be making to svn_* functions
to handle the problem? I've can't apr_hash_clear() on the hash pointer, for
example (expected: there was nothing to return into the hash pointer). What
should I be doing that I'me obviously not doing? Sorry if this sounds like a
desperate cry for help -- but it is. Reading the subversion documentation in
the headers and the automatically generated documentation online hasn't shed
a glaring light on something that I should be doing in the event that this
function fails.

It's critical that I find the correct "oops, something went wrong" steps to
follow -- this behaviour can also be replicated when trying to read the
contents of a file in the repo which doesn't exist. The error only crops up
at apr_terminate() time and obviously can't be handled there. There's also a
very good chance that the final apr_terminate() call will be made well
before the main application is supposed to exit: even if I was sloppy enough
not to care if my app crashed at exit, I couldn't let this one slide.

-d

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Received on 2009-05-28 06:41:10 CEST

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