Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] error: auto propagated local_err

[Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>]

Am 18.09.2019 um 19:10 hat Eric Blake geschrieben:
> On 9/18/19 8:02 AM, Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy wrote:
> > + */
> > +#define MAKE_ERRP_SAFE(errp) \
> > +g_auto(ErrorPropagationStruct) (__auto_errp_prop) = {.errp = (errp)}; \
> > +if ((errp) == NULL || *(errp) == error_abort || *(errp) == error_fatal) { \
> > +    (errp) = &__auto_errp_prop.local_err; \
> > +}
> 
> Not written to take a trailing semicolon in the caller.
> 
> You could even set __auto_errp_prop unconditionally rather than trying
> to reuse incoming errp (the difference being that error_propagate() gets
> called more frequently).

I think this difference is actually a problem.

When debugging things, I hate error_propagate(). It means that the Error
(specifically its fields src/func/line) points to the outermost
error_propagate() rather than the place where the error really happened.
It also makes error_abort completely useless because at the point where
the process gets aborted, the interesting information is already lost.

So I'd really like to restrict the use of error_propagate() to places
where it's absolutely necessary. Unless, of course, you can fix these
practical problems that error_propagate() causes for debugging.

In fact, in the context of Greg's series, I think we really only need to
support hints for error_fatal, which are cases that users are supposed
to see. We should exclude error_abort in MAKE_ERRP_SAFE() because these
are things that are never supposed to happen. A good stack trace is more
important there than adding a hint to the message.

Kevin