Re: critical warnings; turn them off now?

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 15:39 +0000, Bill Haneman wrote:
>
> > Since we're now in code freeze for 2.14, shouldn't we turn off the
> > critical warnings behavior in gnome-session now?
>
> They'll turn themselves on automatically when the version number
> reaches .14; they are on in .13 (they are based on even/odd).

By the way, shouldn't that be enabled/disabled using
configure/Makefile/preprocessor magic instead of parsing the
version number?

> > There are lots of places where this causes unnecessary crashes,
> > particularly in gail and at-spi.  While we want to fix them eventually,
> > it's made accessibility pretty much DOA in 2.13 so far.
>
> A critical warning is not some annoying spew in your console which you
> can ignore; it is an indication that something has gone HORRIBLY wrong
> and you should fix it immediately.  It is not a faint light that says
> "check engine", it is a big siren screaming, "HOLY SHIT, SOMEONE PUT
> SUGAR IN YOUR GAS TANK".

In many cases it's a false alarm.  Something that should not have
marked as such in the first place.  From my experience with Pango
modules recently, one major cause of these false alarms are
g_return_if_fail()s.  It's important to differentiate between
some unusual but perfectly valid failure of something (like
failing to lock a font face, because the font file may have been
removed), and invalid input from the user.  With former, you may
want to do a g_warning and return, only with latter one should
use g_return_if_fail.

In other words, you should use g_return_if_fail in cases that
upon seeing the crash, the developer has something to fix.  This
is not quite the case when font locking fails :)

>   Federico

--behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill"
	-- Dan Bern, "New American Language"