Re: Latest changes to -base in SVN trunk

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 18 Feb 2006, at 22:30, Alex Perez wrote:

> Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> > On 18 Feb 2006, at 13:47, Chris Vetter wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > this is to let you know that the latest changes (made yesterday,  
> > > Friday) are breaking GNUMail.
> > > I updated SVN, recompiled the whole enchilada, quit and restarted  
> > > GNUMail -- which almost immediately core dumped.
> > Fixed ... thanks ... It didn't show up in my tests, but GNUMail  
> > triggered it every time so it was very easy to find.
>
> What was the problem?

Cleanup after a failed creation of a file attributes dictionary was  
dereferencing a null pointer.
Unfortunately, the testsuite didn't contain a test for creating a  
file attributes directory for a non-existent file ... it does now.

I didn't bother checking the GNUMail sourcecode to see why it was  
doing it, but probably it was doing an implicit test for the  
existence of a file by trying to get it's attributes as a more  
efficient alternative to first testing for the files existence and  
then getting its attributes.