--On Monday, August 29, 2005 16:20:15 -0700 Lars Damerow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have a very naive question--is there any reason aside from speed that > cfengine is written in C? The sysadmin in me can't help but think that a > scripting language would have better error reporting than > "Segmentation fault." ;) As a former C programmer, in my opinion there is no reason for a well-written C program to segfault other than HW failures. In cfengine's case, I would hope that the likely culprit is linking in and calling library functions whose actual parameters and return values are different from the way they are defined in the header files it was compiled against, usually due to a version mismatch between the headers available at compile time and the actual libraries linked in at runtime. If this is your problem you might consider building cfengine statically for your kickstart install. The other option is that someone made some (bad) coding assumptions that all data passed to it would be of the correct type and value range, that all function calls would return successfully, and that any decision tree accounts for all possible cases, and thus skipped adding all the necessary error- checking code to exit cleanly with a meaningful error message under any of those situations. If cfengine is in this category then it needs fixing. Frank > > cheers, > lars > > -- > lars damerow > button pusher > pixar animation studios > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Share and Enjoy! > > > _______________________________________________ > Help-cfengine mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine -- Frank Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sr. Systems Administrator Voice: 512-374-4673 Hoover's Online Fax: 512-374-4501 _______________________________________________ Help-cfengine mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine
