avoid workarounds!

[Carsten Pfeiffer]

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On Friday 07 February 2003 10:55, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:

> I was recently greeted with the message
>
> | On last startup, KNotify crashed while creating Arts::Dispatcher. Do you
> | want to try again or disable aRts Sound output?
>
> on login. Could you _please_ not try to spend work on fixing the symptoms
> but on fixing the problems?
>
> Kludging workarounds in higher-level stuff for broken lower-level stuff is
> ineffective, hides the real source of the problems and should not be done.
> If aRts crashes, it should be fixed, and not the program using aRts (which
> is impossible to do while keeping the featureset it was using aRts for in
> the first place anyway).

In general, I agree with that, but KNotify is a special case. It's an 
application that is automatically started and not just once, but e.g. 
whenever a window pops up. A crashing KNotify makes your entire KDE system 
_unusable_. That's inacceptible, sorry.

I think there would be less such problems if there was better error handling 
instead of assert() in arts.

Cheers
Carsten Pfeiffer
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