https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162526
--- Comment #4 from Geoff Kuenning <ge...@cs.hmc.edu> --- (a) That's exactly the point. Doing assert(false) doesn't help reveal the bug or help find out why the pointer is null. The right thing to do is to catch the bug, display a correct and informative message, and only then crash the program. (b) Failing to load a dynamic library isn't a programming error; as in this case it can also be a configuration error. Crashing without a message doesn't help find configuration errors. Get() *knows* what went wrong; it just throws that information away and takes the easy way out. (c) Teaching is my job. :-D And in this case it clearly needs to happen. Crashing is never a correct solution in a user-facing program. It is only because I am unusually expert at low-level debugging that I was able to find the cause of this crash, and even then it took a LONG time investment over a period of months. An ordinary user would have given up--is that how the developers want people to respond to all the hard work they've put into developing this suite? (And in fact, for the better part of six months I've been using Microsoft Office to open spreadsheets; it's only my dedication to open source and my decades of debugging experience that motivated me to put in the effort needed figure this out. Well, that and my stubbornness, which you can see here...) -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
