Re: Allowing Applications to continue after exception...

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 8 Feb 2009, at 04:06, Gregory Casamento wrote:

> Here is the promised patch.   Please take a look and give any  
> feedback you can.
> This is simply a patch to allow the user to set whether or not they  
> want to debug exceptions or not.  The default is NO at present so  
> the exceptions will simply be logged as they are in Cocoa.
> I am going to go ahead and commit this change fairly soon (probably  
> early tomorrow morning) after I do more testing.  If it causes  
> problems for anyone then we can revert it.  I know this goes a bit  
> against what I said earlier (about sending a patch), but I would  
> like to get this in very soon and it's easier for people to examine  
> if it's in the repository.
1. The changes to the uncaught exception handler ... as far as I can  
see the effect of this would be to just cause an app to log the  
exception and abort (assuming it falls back to the default uncaught  
exception handler, or randomly crash if that doesn't work ... you  
can't recover from an uncaught exception, so changing the code to  
remove 'abort()' won't let the app recover.  I would guess that the  
existing behavior might be preferable to this.
2. The change to wrap the call to sendEvent: in an exception handler  
will work though (and should mean that the uncaught hander doesn't get  
called for most exceptions).
But, why not put the update of the main menu inside the handler too?
And why not use the same user default as Apple to control this?  I  
don't think we should be adding a GSDebugException default which is  
not compatible with the Apple stuff, when we could equally well use  
the NSExceptionHandlerMask user default and stay apple compatible.