[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Profiling Civserver again

["Ross W. Wetmore" <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If the world was a perfect place, no bug would last long enough to trouble
anyone, and it would be fixed as you suggest.

The assumptions are safety factors that allow the program to function in spite
of problems. They are most appreciated by people who are 15 hours into a game
when the program crashes with a cryptic message, or maybe no message except
the INSTALL.readme that says report such occurrences to bugs@xxxxxxxxxxx. And
after much of this such people usually dump Freeciv and go back to Sid's 
version.

Defensive programming like defensive driving is worthwhile if it doesn't 
cost that much more to implement or follow the right habits.

If the code were running a Boeing 747, I don't think you would get a lot
of support for your suggested development model, and it really shouldn't
be an apples and oranges comparison.

Besides having tracked down a number of such things, I can tell you from
firsthand experience that it isn't the case that a few local peeks into the 
code will turn up obvious problems. Usually, it is a mistake made next week
generating garbage data 3 left, two up and 6 down that is the culprit :-).

Cheers,
RossW

At 06:31 PM 01/08/01 -0500, Mike Kaufman wrote:
>Perhaps someone could answer this for me: why do we _have_ to assume
possible X values outside [-map.xsize,2*map.xsize] ? When would this
(legitimately) happen?
>
>If a function is (naughtily) setting X too big or small, let's correct the
function. Grepping through the code, I don't see a massive number of places
where map_adjust_x() is called. Ought not be that hard to track down.
Someone please correct my naivete
>
>-mike