Re: Making GNOME crash

[Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com>]

On Sun, 2005-11-06 at 17:39 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> The next releases of glib (HEAD and glib-2-8) will support a new debug
> flag for the G_DEBUG environment variable: fatal_criticals. This make
> the program crash on critical warnings.
> 
> I propose to use this nice feature during the development cycles to help
> eradicate all these critical warnings. I made a simple patch for
> gnome-session:
> 	http://www.gnome.org/~vuntz/tmp/gnome-session.diff
> 
> Why? Well, we currently have critical warnings in a lot of modules. And
> we don't care since we don't notice them. With this, we could easily
> notice them and have nice stack traces to fix them. This should result
> in less bugs.
> 
> Does it make the desktop unusable? Well, the wncklet-applet crashes [1],
> it seems bug-buddy crashes on Fedora [2] and, err, I can't use
> evolution ;-) More crashes are expected, but I think the sooner we fix
> the critical warnings, the better.
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> [1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149326 with a patch
> [2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320062
> 
> Vincent
> 

I'm not convinced that making HEAD unusable for everybody by enforcing
this in gnome-session is the way forward. For one thing, it will
drastically reduce the amount of testing that HEAD gets. I think making
this the focus of a Gnome love day can have the same results without
affecting the testability of HEAD for everybody else.

Matthias