Abrt (was Re: Most buggy packages)

[David Malcolm]

On Thu, 2013-02-21 at 22:41 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
> On 21 February 2013 18:24, David Malcolm <dmalcolm at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2013-02-20 at 08:04 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
> >> On 19 February 2013 12:13, David Malcolm <dmalcolm at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> >>
> >> Question: does a python segfault from a broken script indicate a
> >> python bug as well? The scripting engine shouldn't really be crashing.
> >
> > python -c "from ctypes import string_at; string_at(0xDEADBEEF)"
> >
> 
> Point. 
(sorry about my terseness btw)

> I could try and argue that a scripting language should stop you
> doing this by catching it somehow, but that's unrealistic for this
> case and, as you (sorry, not 100% sure, but going to guess you're the
> same DMalcolm) say here, http://dmalcolm.livejournal.com/4545.html
[Yes I am.  FWIW the prettyprinting C backtrace hooks I talked about
there are in our python-debuginfo package, and set up so that they're
automatically used by gdb on such backtraces if you have
python-debuginfo installed]

> it's a consequence of being able to run native code. Could also be
> viewed as a bug in the bindings rather than python, but, again, it's
> what they're supposed to do.

Yeah, ctypes is a big source of crashes in my experience: you get all of
the responsibility of dealing with C datatypes, pointers, etc, but
there's no type system to guarantee that you got it correct.  Gah.


> However hopefully most python programmes aren't doing things like
> this. And of course it'll be better all round if the bugs go to the
> programme that caused them.

+1000

Cheers
Dave