Re: a patch for tasklist segfaulting...

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 11:19:58AM -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> > As tasklist applet has been occassionally segfaulting, because
> > GwmhTask's name member was NULL, I've commited this patch to gnome-core
> > HEAD. I suppose this is not the nicest solution, as I haven't really
> > tracked down the why GwmhTask's name member is NULL, but it prevents
> > segmentation faults which take down the whole panel as the applet is a
> > library...
> 
> It is rather scary that these patches are going through without any
> review.
> 
> 	"It crashes because something is NULL"
> 
> 	"Well, just return if it is NULL"
> 
> Without ever checking if that is a valid condition and indeed the
> simple fix was correct, or if it is just a handwaving hack.

I'd much rather there was a wrong fix that makes it not crash then to have it
crash.  Now that tasklist is shlib (which I'm beginning to think was not the
greatest idea in the world).  A crash can take down the panel.  Which you say
may be ok, since the panel restarts.  But the panel restarts with the
tasklist.  Most reports are from people who can't get a panel to not crash
upon login.  There were about 10 reports of this yesterday.  So I would far
rather have a wrong fix, then no fix.

Jaka did post about what he did, so it's not like the patch went in silently.
And I'd hope that if he has any more of these patches he'll just commit them
and tell us.  (though I have a tendency to find these things out by looking
at the ChangeLog which is a wonderful thing).

Plus this was a CORRECT patch.  The name is concievable to be NULL.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   When they kick at your front door, how're you gonna come?
   With your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun?
                                         -- The Clash