Re: IMPORTANT: fix critical warnings before January 1st

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 11/11/05, Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com> wrote:
> 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.

In the meantime, maybe someone can collect and post lists of them?
[And maybe someone should create a keyword for them in bugzilla?]

Luis