Hello, I'd like to remove the backtrace printing from OSL_ASSERT and friends, or, even better and if possible, make these functions work properly, i.e. abort on failure (I'm not really holding my breath on the second one, but refusing that one will at least support the first one).
When building with debug >= 1, the majority of debug output for me is backtraces from debug functions like OSL_ASSERT that uselessly pollute the output (I added one OSL_ASSERT last week and it took me several days to notice the assertion was always false and the message got lost in all the noise around). First of all, the backtraces are actually useless even on their own, because with today's Linux toolchain backtrace() or dladdr() simply do not work for most functions - things like hidden visibility prevent it from working and who builds without that these days? That alone could be a good reason for removing the backtrace printing, but I find them useless in general. There are two ways to look at OSL_ASSERT and friends: 1) they are misnamed debug functions (which is presumably what they really are now). Every properly brought up assert function aborts if the condition is false, but these are more like debug messages or warnings - OSL_ASSERT doesn't assert that much, OSL_ENSURE doesn't ensure anything, they just print the error message (and the annoying backtrace) and then return like if nothing were nothing wrong. Now, if there's nothing really that wrong, what's the point of printing the huge backtrace like if something important happened, right? In this case it'd be also nice to get somewhen to renaming them to OSL_DEBUG or something so that it doesn't confuse people who expect a real assert. 2) they are assert functions, they just don't work right and should be fixed to make the app abort and fall flat on its face when the assertion is not true (in practice, flip the default on $SAL_DIAGNOSE_ABORT). I expect this wouldn't be a simple change, as this would at this time probably mean nobody would be able to successfully run LO for some time :), so that'd require a transitional period, e.g. similar to how compile warnings are fixed to make compilation with -Werror possible. No idea how much effort this would be, it's the technically right way, but I don't know if it'd be worth it. Opinions? -- Lubos Lunak l.lu...@suse.cz _______________________________________________ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice