[freeciv-ai] Re: aiair uses set_unit_activity() directly

[Jason Dorje Short <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Per Inge Mathisen wrote:
> We should whenever possible gate all our server calls through the
> appropriate handle_*() functions, instead of doing direct changes to the
> server state.
One problem is the handle_* functions generally fail silently if they 
are given invalid input.  Obviously when getting data from a network 
this is correct.  But when an AI is involved we'd usually like an 
assertion instead.
One idea is to change code in the handle_* functions from

  if (!normalize_map_pos(&x, &y)) return;

to

  if (!normalize_map_pos(&x, &y)) {
    assert(pplayer->conn != NULL);
    return;
  }

which will get the assertions to happen for AI players only (but not for 
autosettlers of human players).  This is a bit ugly but not very hard. 
Another idea is to have wrappers like ai_handle_* to do the work.  Yet 
another idea is to have the handle_* functions be the wrappers that do 
sanity checking only and then call an internal function base_handle_* to 
do the real work, with assertions.  Yet another idea is just to ignore 
the problem - but this can give bizarre errors (like the one where 
handle_unit_load() was failing silently, causing ferry code to crash 
obscurely).
jason