Re: Post-mortem debugging and abort

[David Kastrup]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:02:20 +0200
>> 
>> 
>> I just wanted to report that the declaration of "abort" in glibc is not
>> going to be changed to be more compatible with debugging.
>> 
>> <URL:http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6522> shows my
>> report and its resolution.
>
> Sigh.  I concluded a long time ago that it is useless to ask GCC and
> glibc developers to cater to debugging needs.  At best, you are
> ignored; but more often you are flamed back into silence.

I was a bit amused about "stop keeping to reopen".  I reopened once,
giving detailed reasons and citing additional manpage data.  When the
thing was basically closed without looking at the argument after a month
of silence.  So it could not have been all that painful.

> I'm sorry that you, David, wasted your effort as well on this.

Well, the whole difference between exit (or maybe _exit?) and abort is
the core dump, and that is why abort rather than exit is also called on
failed assertions.  So debugging is the whole point of abort and
declaring it in a way that precludes debugging is a bit pointless.  So
that's the reason why I considered it worth a try, even though I know
that GCC/glibc consider debugging a second class citizen.  But as long
as we are talking about what is pretty much a pure debugging facility...

Well, no point preaching to the choir here.  I am pretty sure that not
just Emacs developers will be tripped up by this, but it is here that I
have had quite a bit of anecdotal evidence about people wasting a lot of
time unnecessarily.

-- 
David Kastrup