Per Jessen wrote:
Segfaults are a fact of life
Only if you are forced to accept poor programming. I can assure you
that segfaults are not tolerated in a regular production environment.
Segfaults happen in test and development.
I agree with you for the most part, but there are several points that
need to be made.
First of all you need to remember that you are talking about an open
source project. I know that's no excuse for "poor programming" as you
call it, but it's also unreasonable to expect perfect code.
Secondly you need to clarify what you actually want. When PHP segfaults
I doubt it's actually PHP that's doing it, it's more likely to be one of
the extensions being used. This is what I meant when I said segfaults
are a fact of life. You're dealing with a system that can be compiled
with arbitrary code from any source. While it's not out of the question
I very much doubt there are any cases where an extra double quote will
cause a segfault in the engine itself.
The code you sent in response to dev-at-lenss.nl doesn't really say
where the problem is, but it seems to be all about XSL which is not
handled by PHP, it's done by a PHP extension.
and it's very difficult to cover every possible cause, especially when
you are using a number of external libraries. Expecting PHP to be
perfect is unrealistic.
Actually I think the PHP developers should strive for just that. Not to
do so is like the GCC people saying - "well, don't expect us to
generate working code EVERY time" ...
I believe that the core PHP devs do everything they can to ensure the
reliability of the core PHP code. Unfortunately the same cannot be said
for the multitude of extension developers out there.
The Zend engine does generate "working" code every time in much the same
way as GCC does. If that code uses extensions then the engine has no way
of protecting against those extensions causing segfaults.
To return to the original point, in a commercial environment it is
perfectly reasonable to expect developers to spend time hunting down the
cause of a segfault (or other bug). It is not reasonable to expect the
same from a volunteer-driven development team. As has previously been
mentioned, requiring a simple script that reproduces the problem every
time it's executed is pretty standard.
One final note... if you've spent "professional life (sofar) doing
development in C and assembler" why aren't you digging into the source
code, fixing the problems and submitting patches rather than
complaining? That, after all, is what open source projects like PHP are
all about.
-Stut
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http://stut.net/
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