Re: Some example code for a new crash handler

[Hongl Lai <hongli telekabel nl>]

On Sat, 2002-01-12 at 00:59, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Charles Iliya Krempeaux <tnt linux ca> writes: 
> > Well, how about, instead of saving things over the original files,
> > you save it as another file name.
> 
> You don't understand the problem - the problem is that once you get
> the SEGV signal, any piece of memory in the program could contain
> total junk. _Any_ piece. That means there is no way to do anything
> sane. Say you save your spreadsheet - one of the values in the
> 100,000-row sheet could be slightly incorrect, for example.
> 
> Havoc


But then there's also a chance that a non-critical part of the memory
gets corrupt.
And what do you think is worse? Losing all 300 entries you were working
at because of a crash, or a file with 200 good entries and 100 bad
entries?

If the saved file if totally corrupt, then so be it.
That is no worse than a crash, where you lose everything.
But there's a chance that the file won't get corrupt, or only partially
corrupt.
We should give users the chance to save what can be saved, don't you
think?

I'm not trying to say that programs doesn't have to be bugfree.
I'm not against autosave.
But I think it's best if we do everything we can to save:
fix bugs, implement autosave, AND surpress sigsegv for while to give the
user some time.