Re: Making GNOME crash

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 15:17 +0000, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
> Seg, 2005-11-07 �01:36 -0500, Matthias Clasen escreveu:
> > On Sun, 2005-11-06 at 17:39 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> > > Hey,
> > > 
> > > The next releases of glib (HEAD and glib-2-8) will support a new debug
> > > flag for the G_DEBUG environment variable: fatal_criticals. This make
> > > the program crash on critical warnings.
> > > 
> > > I propose to use this nice feature during the development cycles to help
> > > eradicate all these critical warnings. I made a simple patch for
> > > gnome-session:
> > > 	http://www.gnome.org/~vuntz/tmp/gnome-session.diff
> > > 
> > > Why? Well, we currently have critical warnings in a lot of modules. And
> > > we don't care since we don't notice them. With this, we could easily
> > > notice them and have nice stack traces to fix them. This should result
> > > in less bugs.
> > > 
> > > Does it make the desktop unusable? Well, the wncklet-applet crashes [1],
> > > it seems bug-buddy crashes on Fedora [2] and, err, I can't use
> > > evolution ;-) More crashes are expected, but I think the sooner we fix
> > > the critical warnings, the better.
> > > 
> > > What do you think?
> > > 
> > > [1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149326 with a patch
> > > [2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320062
> > > 
> > > Vincent
> > > 
> > 
> > I'm not convinced that making HEAD unusable for everybody by enforcing
> > this in gnome-session is the way forward. For one thing, it will
> > drastically reduce the amount of testing that HEAD gets. I think making
> > this the focus of a Gnome love day can have the same results without
> > affecting the testability of HEAD for everybody else.
> 
>   I completely agree.  This reminds me of some modules in the past
> having hardcoded -Werror in CFLAGS.  Some people just want to compile
> and run GNOME, not be forced into fixing every module in the way.
> 
Actually GStreamer do this, include -Werror, and it is in my opinion
something which has worked out very well for us. Yes, it was a bit
painful to get it working to begin with and it was a bit painful
when gcc4 came out, but in general it means that we keep our code
warning free, which I think has kept a lot of bugs from creeping in
which would otherwise have been drowned in a sea of 'harmless' warnings.

It isn't painful today as we catch new compile warnings right away, so
fixing those isn't more painful than making sure your code follows
module conventions and is acceptable in general.

I don't know how this crash thing would turn out/work, but if it means
we will have 3-4 painful weeks and after that have a GNOME with a lot of
crasher bugs fixed then I am all for it. Cause after that new crashers
will be caught as they are introduced which probably also is the time
when its easy to fix them. (probably me being to naive though)

Christian