Hello,
I'd like to remove the backtrace printing from OSL_ASSERT and friends, or,
even better and if possible, make these functions work properly, i.e. abort
on failure (I'm not really holding my breath on the second one, but refusing
that one will at least support the first one).
When building with debug >= 1, the majority of debug output for me is
backtraces from debug functions like OSL_ASSERT that uselessly pollute the
output (I added one OSL_ASSERT last week and it took me several days to
notice the assertion was always false and the message got lost in all the
noise around).
First of all, the backtraces are actually useless even on their own, because
with today's Linux toolchain backtrace() or dladdr() simply do not work for
most functions - things like hidden visibility prevent it from working and
who builds without that these days? That alone could be a good reason for
removing the backtrace printing, but I find them useless in general. There
are two ways to look at OSL_ASSERT and friends:
1) they are misnamed debug functions (which is presumably what they really are
now). Every properly brought up assert function aborts if the condition is
false, but these are more like debug messages or warnings - OSL_ASSERT
doesn't assert that much, OSL_ENSURE doesn't ensure anything, they just print
the error message (and the annoying backtrace) and then return like if
nothing were nothing wrong. Now, if there's nothing really that wrong, what's
the point of printing the huge backtrace like if something important
happened, right? In this case it'd be also nice to get somewhen to renaming
them to OSL_DEBUG or something so that it doesn't confuse people who expect a
real assert.
2) they are assert functions, they just don't work right and should be fixed
to make the app abort and fall flat on its face when the assertion is not
true (in practice, flip the default on $SAL_DIAGNOSE_ABORT). I expect this
wouldn't be a simple change, as this would at this time probably mean nobody
would be able to successfully run LO for some time :), so that'd require a
transitional period, e.g. similar to how compile warnings are fixed to make
compilation with -Werror possible. No idea how much effort this would be,
it's the technically right way, but I don't know if it'd be worth it.
Opinions?
--
Lubos Lunak
l.lunak@suse.cz
Context
- [Libreoffice] OSL_ASSERT - remove backtrace or make abort · Lubos Lunak
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