FreeTDS Development Group

[christos AT zoulas.com (Christos Zoulas)]

On Mar 1,  4:53pm, freddy77 AT gmail.com (Frediano Ziglio) wrote:
-- Subject: Re: [freetds] [PATCH] to remove exit statements from libct

| Well... I removed 3 of the exit you spot. Think about asserts, they
| exit application if they don't pass. I agree to remove any print
| statements and I removed a lot. There are however situations when even
| the os kernel "exit" (that is stop the entire system). In this case if
| an internal handler returns any values which are not coded to return
| some nasty things happen and I don't see any point in keeping going.

Well, asserts use usually no-ops in non-debug builds, and do
extensive consistency tests in debug builds. So it is up to the
user to build a debug version of the library or a production one.
And the kernel panics in many situations where it detects that
continuing might cause more damage (for example in the filesystem
code when what it finds on the disk is not what it expects to find),
but usually the panic calls are the result of lazy programming (I
don't want to figure out what I need to do to cleanup; the caller
does not know what to do if I fail). In the past there have been
many efforts to reduce the number of panic calls in the Unix kernel
to make it more reliable. Unless I am missing something, I see no
reason for libct to ever need to call exit(2) since in the majority
of scenarios the application should be able to recover by cleaning
up all pending state, and re-initializing the connection. Of course
if libct determines that there is no way for the application to recover
perhaps it should abort(3) instead.

christos