On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 06:44:16PM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote: > After some 20 years of developing popular free software, I have > somewhat of an idea what users are likely to do.
Many of us have developed software for a similar period of time, and yet feel differently. > I don't use > fancy_abort functions because I've found, from experience, that the > line number alone is not very useful. It is the first necessary piece > of information, but very rarely will anyone track down the bug from > that alone. Agreed. However, if this is a frequently reported bug, then the developer might well know, as soon as he sees the error from the second user, that it is the same bug, while if there is only an abort there is less information. If the developer does not answer the bug report promptly, the user might still find information about the crash with a web search, because a search for tool: fatal internal error in frobnicate.c, frob_all_elements, line 372 is likely to find something if it exists, while a search for abort - core dumped is less likely to find something useful. Now, I wouldn't object to hacking GCC to avoid cross-jumping calls to abort. It's just that I don't think that the common GNU use of abort serves the users.