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Re: Merging calls to `abort'
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.
> I don't use
> fancy_abort functions because I've found, from experience, that the
> line number alone is not very useful. It is the first necessary piece
> of information, but very rarely will anyone track down the bug from
> that alone.
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. 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.
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.