[Freeassociation-devel] Default value for ical_errors_are_fatal

[Patrick Ohly]

On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 20:38 +0530, Suman Manjunath wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 20:11, Allen Winter <winter at kde.org> wrote:
> > Except suppose another project (eg. KDE) want the opposite behavior?
> > Then a distro will have to choose who best to support.  They won't
> > provide  libical-barf and libical-nobarf packages.
> >
> > All those asserts were a pain to deal with -- no doubt about it.
> > OTOH, we found real problems in our KDE code because of them.
> 
> It's good to know that bugs were fixed in your code. It may not be the
> case with other projects. It certainly is not the case with evolution
> and friends.

How do you know? Probably I'm missing something, but isn't the reason
why Evolution needs the icalerror_errors_are_fatal to be off that it
*does* trip up libical occasionally?

Are you saying that this is because of legimitate error cases (bad input
data, etc.) and not because of bugs in Evolution? That is a pretty bold
statement; it would be interesting to see what happens when running
Evolution with icalerror_errors_are_fatal enabled.

> > So I'm more in favor of the applications dealing with it; either they
> > fix their code or they need to set the global variable appropriately.
> 
> Like I mentioned, it's good to have the fatality in a developer
> environment (which is why I proposed it be enabled by default), but
> not in a shipped package. Maybe not yet.
> 
> The option of setting the variable at runtime is probably not a good
> option EVER, for each process which depends libical needs to do it.
> Every application that depends on a library that in-turn depends on
> libical need to do 'em again.

The global option per se is problematic, because one part of a program
might want it to be on and another, completely independent part which
also uses libical wants it to be off. Not sure what can be done about
it, given the current libical API. I don't think it matters much whether
it is on or off by default.

Back to the Evolution context: why is it bad to set
icalerror_errors_are_fatal to 0 when libecal is initialized? That
ensures that it is off whenever Evolution or libecal apps are using
libical, doesn't it?

If you are concerned that the initialization order might become relevant
(app starts, sets icalerror_errors_are_fatal to 1, libecal resets it to
0), then you could declare a global variable of the same name with value
0 in libecal and not explicitly set it anywhere in libecal. Put the
symbol in its own .o file and you are guaranteed to not have linking
isues, even with static linking.

-- 
Bye, Patrick Ohly
--  
Patrick.Ohly at gmx.de
http://www.estamos.de/