[mapserver-dev] Mapserver assertion handling causing potential crashes

[Steve Lime]

Assuming you’re interpreting this correctly then I agree with you. I’ve not
used assertions personally.

On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 1:09 PM Tamas Szekeres <szekerest at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Devs,
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> We are experiencing frequent crashes in the mapserver codebase in a heavy
> loaded runtime environment that causes the entire host process to exit
> regularly. According to the crash report it mostly points to the following
> location:
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> *static int msOGRGetPaging(layerObj *layer){#ifdef USE_OGR  msOGRFileInfo
> *layerinfo = NULL;  if (layer->debug) {    msDebug("msOGRGetPaging
> called.\n");  }  if(!msOGRLayerIsOpen(layer))    msOGRLayerOpenVT(layer);
> assert( layer->layerinfo != NULL);   <<<<< assert is happenting here
> layerinfo = (msOGRFileInfo *)layer->layerinfo;  return layerinfo->bPaging;
>  <<<<< crash is happening here#else  msSetError( MS_MISCERR,
> "OGR support is not available.",              "msOGREnablePaging()");
> return MS_FAILURE;#endif}*
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> I just wanted to ask, what do folks think about this practice? It looks
> like the author of the code thinks that something will happen in the
> assertion to prevent the code to execute the next statements. However the
> assert check does no op in a production build or in a process that is not
> attached to a debugger session. As far as I can imagine the code should
> programmatically handle the asserted situation and do something useful if
> in our case layer->layerinfo is NULL.
> As far as I see, the current codebase is full of such preconception that
> assert stops the operation (or exits the function, whatever?) and we should
> do nothing special when the condition is met.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Tamas
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