I think we should try to make an effort to get 1.4.0cvs into a state where we could ask adventurous users to try it out.
Right now, we've plenty of crashes, so this seems to be impossible. However, most of the current crashes are the direct response to an assert, so they are somehow home made. Of course I understand that an assert is there to be fixed in case it fires, but it somehow does not look like this will happen in finite time. Moreover, in most places, working around the faulty condition is possible in a way that leads in the worst case to aborting the current operation but does not crash the whole of lyx. That's why I propose changing some/most/all asserts to something less brutish, i.e. an exception carrying the same information as the assert that will be caught in the main loop (i.e. the outermost dispatch or even in the frontends). Opinions? Andre'
