[vlc-devel] [PATCH] mmdevice: don't hard crash when CoInitializeEx fails on Start, show the reason

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le 2015-03-18 14:16, Steve Lhomme a écrit :
> In my debugger (gdb in QtCreator on Windows) it did not catch the
> crash at all.

So your debugger is crap or not set up correctly. And?

> Also when a user reports a bug, it's much easier to use
> a log than a stack trace.

How many VLC bugs have you investigated? I have gone through several 
actual thousands of them. For crash reports, a symbolic stack trace is a 
lot better than a log in the outstanding majority of cases. The 
combination of both is even better... Either way, a clean abort/assert 
is the best way to obtain a stack trace.

> And as a more general remark, crashing is the worst user experience,

No. Crashing with corruption is worse than just crashing cleanly. And 
failing silently or with an obscure error is not always better than 
crashing cleanly.

> it should be avoid whenever possible.

Again, avoiding a crash on UB makes no sense because UB is UB.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont