Sam Steingold wrote: > I am not saying that abort() is wrong. > I am saying that it must be accompanied by a meaningful message.
OK, this is a different issue. > E.g, "Gnulib.drop_privileges_permanently: failed to drop privileges". > Or just "Error A23Z51DT97". > Then the user can google for the message and see what has happened, instead > of > filing a bug, identical (in essence) to 100s of already filed bugs - one for > each package which uses this gnulib feature. I agree with you that shortening the reporting/feedback loop in case of hitting an abort() call would be useful: Some users don't know how to launch gdb, some users (on mingw) don't even possess a working gdb. This is an issue that potentially affects all of gnulib, not just the 'idpriv-drop' module. But OTOH I think the abort()s are being run into very rarely. We have over 400 abort() calls in gnulib, and rarely get a report of an abort() in this code. Most likely this is because in places where we are not 99.9% sure we use return codes, not abort(). The vision of "hundreds" of bug reports about the same abort() is highly improbable. Regarding the 'idpriv-drop' module: I have tested the code on a number of relevant platforms. What do the others think? Should we possibly extend stdlib.in.h so that abort() becomes a macro that produces a detailed error message, similar to what assert() does? Bruno
