Re: [RFA] mdebugread.c (psymtab_to_symtab_1): assert that 'fh' is not null

Jan Kratochvil
2011-03-06T18:54:03Z

On Sun, 06 Mar 2011 19:46:23 +0100, Michael Snyder wrote:
> All these recent submissions of mine are coming from running Coverity
> on gdb. In this case, Coverity reports that we checked the variable fh
> for null (suggesting that we think null is possible), but then
> dereferenced it on an unchecked path.
>
> I figured that triggering an assert was more gracefull than just
> crashing on a null pointer dereference, and gives the user the chance
> to recover.

I agree from the user point of view it may be (slightly) better (*).

But from the GDB developers point of view this change without any specific
code comment is not acceptable (as explained in my mail) as it confuses the
code readers.

I would find perfect:

/* FIXME: FH may be NULL here but the code below cannot handle it. */
gdb_assert (fh);

Thanks,
Jan

(*) In fact I like the crash from the Fedora point of view better as ABRT
(Automatic Bug Reporting Tool) will automatically report it. In the case
of a failed gdb_assert the user may or may not allow the core dump and
therefore the crash bugreport by ABRT may be suppressed.
A problem internal to GDB has been detected,
further debugging may prove unreliable.
Create a core file of GDB? (y or n) n
This is just FYI and it should not be related to FSF GDB maintenance.