Re: a patch for tasklist segfaulting...

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 09:50:12AM -0800 or thereabouts, George wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 11:19:58AM -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> > It is rather scary that these patches are going through without any
> > review.
> > 
> > 	"It crashes because something is NULL"
> > 
> > 	"Well, just return if it is NULL"
> > 
> > Without ever checking if that is a valid condition and indeed the
> > simple fix was correct, or if it is just a handwaving hack.
> 
> I'd much rather there was a wrong fix that makes it not crash then to 
> have it crash.  Now that tasklist is shlib (which I'm beginning to think 
> was not the greatest idea in the world).  A crash can take down the panel. 
> Which you say may be ok, since the panel restarts.  But the panel restarts 
> with the tasklist. 

Ditto for deskguide. 

I have twice brought down the whole of X whilst monkeying with the beta.
This is on a machine which (unusually for me) does not have some weirdo
video/X problems. 

All sorts of things have changed, but I am inclined to blame it on the
deskguide. Trying to restart X results in the panel respawning, with the
bloody deskguide in it with the same settings that somehow triggered the
crash. This is not fun. I have not bugzilla'd it because I can't prove
it's the deskguide. 

If you can't get the panel and the deskguide/tasklist to behave long
enough to remove the deskguide or tasklist from the panel with right-click
->remove this from panel, there is nothing you can do about it.

Telsa