On Mon, 2005-03-14 at 16:17 -0800, Joe Buck wrote: > On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 06:44:16PM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote: > > After some 20 years of developing popular free software, I have > > somewhat of an idea what users are likely to do. > > Many of us have developed software for a similar period of time, > and yet feel differently. Right.
> Agreed. However, if this is a frequently reported bug, then the > developer might well know, as soon as he sees the error from the second > user, that it is the same bug, while if there is only an abort there > is less information. Right. Through the years I've found file and line number information provided by a fancy abort have been enough to identify the more common internal failures in releases and even from time to time internal failures during development. > If the developer does not answer the bug report > promptly, the user might still find information about the crash with > a web search, because a search for > > tool: fatal internal error in frobnicate.c, frob_all_elements, line 372 > > is likely to find something if it exists, while a search for > > abort - core dumped > > is less likely to find something useful. Absolutely. I also think that the message itself is more comforting than just a plain abort. ie, if we look at the range of failures some are more reassuring/friendly than others. On one end we have naked segmentation faults. On the other we might have diagnostics which indicate that a particular feature is unimplemented. In between we have a naked abort and an abort with a potentially useful message indicating file/line information and possibly the cause of the abort. > Now, I wouldn't object to hacking GCC to avoid cross-jumping calls to > abort. It's just that I don't think that the common GNU use of abort > serves the users. Agreed. And as someone suggested, rather than treating abort specially within GCC, I think we'd be better off with a function attribute which prevented cross jumping to any function with the attribute set. Jeff
