Re: D3/Linux program abort

"mwright" wrote:
I'm hoping for a MUCH better error msg next time!!!! :^)

Glad the issue was resolved, Mark.

I have discussions with developers all the time about this sort of
thing. The fire is out and the trucks have left the scene, but the
same sort of fire could occur anywhere. Most developers are
interested in putting out the fire and getting on to the next problem,
rather than solving the real problem. No error message, no problem,
right? No, find out what allowed someone to walk into a cryptic error
and don't allow the code to do that.

I frequently petition my vendors to get their software to recognize
when something simple has gone wrong, and to provide an appropriate
error message so that we can get through diagnostics quickly and get
on with our work. For example, don't give us a core dump; recognize
that the return value of that last call was a negative number and
display an error message, rather than continuing on into code that
can't handle that value.

There's also the "techno error" that developers tend to display when
something in English would be just as appropriate:
"KQR89.Z: obj unassgd" makes no sense, where "Value Name cannot be
null" makes much more sense. I'll pay 2 cents for the extra vowel but
I'd much prefer a real message.

And since we're here, I know some people are hesitent to display any
sort of error at all. QM provides a flag to disable warnings and
Caché doesn't display "var unassigned" errors at all. C'mon folks,
when there's a problem we need to know about it!

For this br.store.rtn issue, I think it would be difficult to solve
the root problem because the code was being asked to do something
unusual. In other places in D3 and other products, however, the
software can easily recognize invalid conditions and report them way
before they get down this low and cause the process to fall to debug
or a monitor halt.

If you have code that blows up like this, take steps to fix it. If
you find yourself wasting time chasing enigmatic error messages, ask
your vendor to enhance their code so that 1) you don't fall into that
sort of code, and 2) when you do, they should give you the information
you need to figure out what happened so that you don't need to waste
your time or theirs.

Ahhh, that felt better. :)

T
.

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