[Xastir-dev] Blame Canada for xastir segfaults

[Owen DeLong]

I may be naive here, but, doesn't that mean that we should improve the
error reporting in Xastir so that it detects this problem and informs
the user instead of segfaulting?

Again, I'm not an expert, but, I was always taught that a segfault indicated
a bug in the software.  Usually a failure to adequately check some form of
input before depending on it conforming to assertions.

If we're using a library to parse these files and that library is what is
actually segfaulting, then, I think we have a few different options
(which aren't necessarily mutually exclusive):

	1.	File a bug with the library development team.
	2.	Fix the library and submit appropriate patches to the
		development team (yeah, I know, resource issue, but,
		it's an option).
	3.	Trap the SIGSEGV from the library and produce a more
		helpful error message.

Just my $0.02, and, it may not be worth that.

Owen


--On Tuesday, March 23, 2004 10:25 AM -0800 "Curt, WE7U" 
<archer at eskimo.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 21 Mar 2004, Jack Twilley wrote:
>
>> I downloaded some shapefiles from Canada's "National Atlas" site.
>>
>> I tried to use one of them, pvp.shp, and xastir crashed.  All I do is
>> change its map level to 100 (so it'll be visible), and kapow,
>> segfault.  Other maps seem to have a similar effect.
>>
>> http://www.twilley.org/~jmt/tmp/canada.tar.gz -- the offending files
>
> Running "xastir -v2047 &" and trying each of them, it comes down to
> the glap.* set of maps that are causing the segfault.  If you run
> them through shpdump/dbfdump you also get segfaults, which most
> likely means that there is a mismatch between the numbers of shapes
> in each of the three files, or some other problem in the shapefiles
> themselves.
>
> --
> Curt, WE7U			    archer at eskimo dot com
> Arlington, WA, USA		http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
> "Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
> "Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
> "The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"
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