Dave,
It is nice to see a programmer accept blame for something. Too many hide
behind the euphemism du jour ("issue") as if they had nothing to do with it.
A long time ago, I read an article that objected to the term "bug," suggesting
that it was too easy to pass of as something relatively harmless; the author
favored the term "defect." It is even more applicable now. If you want to
have fun, get across a table with a programmer who measures his/her worth by
listing their MS certifications, and insist on using "defect" every time they
pass something off as an "issue." The looks of horror can be quite
entertaining.
But I digress. Ok, you blew it<g>. Feel better? You're man enough to take
the heat (not that we're going to give you any). However, the vm is partially
at fault, because (AFICT), it fails to trap crashes.
IMHO, the worst thing a program can do is lock up. The next worst thing it can
do is disappear w/o leaving a reason for it. So, I *do* blame the vm for not
doing more to help us find this.
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David T. Lewis
Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 11:09 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] OSProcess - working on gnuplot
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 03:20:41PM -0500, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
> Stef,
>
> The only problems I have found are in the unit tests, which somewhere along
> the line cause a vm crash. Otherwise, it seems to work. Until it either
> proves unstable or otherwise lets me down, I'm trying to press forward with
> it, since I agree that it is REALLY important that this and other other
> FFI-like features work and work well.
>
> In general, I find the Linux vm to be too willing to crash w/o leaving a
> trace, or at least a trace that I know how to find(??).
Hi Bill,
I am not sure what was causing the crashes (I have seen this too, although not
on the latest Pharo that I tried tonight). But I am quite sure that you should
not blame the VM, and you should not blame Pharo either. In such a case, the
fault lies with the person who wrote the plugin that crashed (that would be
me). I expect that the unit tests ended up passing the "wrong" object as a
parameter to some primitive in OSProcessPlugin, which in turn led to a crash.
Most likely the symptoms (VM crash) will go away whenever we figure out the
issues with OSProcess on Pharo, but only correct solution is to write the
primitives with enough parameter checking that a VM crash cannot happen.
If I see this problem again, I'll try running the VM under a gdb debugger to
find out which primitive is causing the crash. That's probably the only way to
find it, because the VM cannot prevent a sloppy plugin from doing a segfault
and exiting.
Dave
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