PSPP-BUG: [bug #20874] Exit gracefully if glade files cannot be found.

[Ben Pfaff]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #20874 (project pspp):

> > Usually software should be written so that data files cannot cause
> > it to crash.
> To talk about that, we need to define "data file" and "crash". The
> glade files can be considered `code' which happens to be written in
> XML instead of C. 

Yes, this is true.

Usually, program libraries and shared objects have a versioning scheme
to make it difficult to mis-match incompatible versions.  I don't know
whether there is a corresponding scheme for .glade files.  If there
is, I hope that we can use it, at least to the extent that each PSPP
official release has a unique version.

> Similary, is an assertion failure a `crash' or an
> error message followed by exit?

It's a crash.  IMO, assertions should only be used for conditions that
cannot happen unless there is a bug in the application.  The PSPP
handler for assertion failure even explicitly tells the user that
there is a bug and that we would like to hear about it.

That's the way I feel about "assert", anyhow.  GTK+ seems to have a
litany of assertion-like constructs with different properties.  I've
never looked at those, so I don't really know how I feel about them.

> If an out-of-date glade file, doesn't provide an essential widget, or
> the set of properties that the code expects, then there is no way the
> code could handle this (in the genreal case). The only sensible thing
> it can do is give up. The question is, when should it decide to give
> up? and what error message(s) should it produce?

Giving up quickly, if the error cannot be recovered from, is just
fine.  A message like "PSPP file '....' is missing or out-of-date.
Please run "make install"." would be perfect IMO, but I think that
your message "could not find glad file '....'." is fine too.


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