IMPORTANT: fix critical warnings before January 1st

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

Dear hackers of GNOME,

Vincent announced this the other day:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-November/msg00006.html

And there was a discussion of how to implement this plan.

Glib now supports setting an environment variable, "G_DEBUG=fatal_criticals". 

Doing this will cause programs to abort when a critical warning gets
triggered.  What is a critical warning?  This is a critical warning:

   gtk_widget_show (NULL);

     g_return_if_fail (widget != NULL);

A critical warning is an indication that something has gone REALLY WRONG
in your program and you should fix it right away.

THE PROBLEM
-----------

People, including hackers, run most programs from the panel menus, or
from clicking on icons.  They don't ever watch the console where these
warnings appear.  So, they don't get informed that something is wrong
with the software.

As a deeper problem, things launched through bonobo-activation-server
send their warnings to nowhere, /dev/null, empty space.  YOU CAN'T SEE
THESE WARNINGS EVEN IF YOU TRY.  This is a known bug.

THE SOLUTION
------------

Fix the goddamn code, of course.

Turning on G_DEBUG=fatal_criticals is an excellent way to catch these
warnings:  the culprit programs will just crash.  Then you can use gdb
on them.

To avoid pissing everyone off, we'll enable this variable automatically
on January 1st.  In the meantime, we have over 1.5 months to proactively
look for critical warnings and fix them.

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
------------------

1. Get Glib HEAD.

2. Turn on G_DEBUG=fatal_criticals when running your favorite programs.
Maintainers: this means you.

3. Fix the bugs.

DEADLINE
--------

Remember, on January 1st 2006 this change will happen automatically, and
things that have not been fixed will start crashing all over the place.
So fix them now.

Love,

  Federico