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: pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr [mailto:pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr] On Behalf Of David T. Lewis Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 11:09 PM To: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr 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 _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project