Re: crash: x_error_quitter

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     What's wrong with spitting out an error message to the terminal and
>     trying to continue, as I believe other X programs do?
>
> Users are not likely to report it or debug it.

Frankly, users are not likely to report or debug a crash, anyway.  And
then there is the problem that post-mortem debugging of abort calls or
failed assertions is typically completely unreliable (at least without
-fno-crossjumping and likely some other options) because gcc knows
that abort can't return and will, for that reason, just jump to any
old abort call, and without bothering to keep the stack frame in a
useful state.  Which means that the traceback is likely completely
wrong, and local variables, in particular those that have been stored
in registers, are also completely unusable.

So we are not likely to get useful bug reports, anyway, unless the
person compiled Emacs herself and made judicious use of options as
suggested in etc/DEBUG.

-- 
David Kastrup