[Libreoffice] gravity of raised assertions?

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 10/31/2011 03:31 PM, Terrence Enger wrote:
> There has been a lot of discussion in the past about raised
> assertions and how seriously they should be treated.  Is
> there a current concensus?
>
> I raise the question again for no better reason than that
> even a newbie like me can see a raised assertion and collect
> a backtrace.  Guidance welcome.

OOo earlier this year introduced a mechanism to let smoketestoo_native 
fail in case of assertions (implemented by somebody who did not come 
from the "assertions need to abort. period." camp, btw).  LibO promptly 
imported that feature (without any debate AFAIK).

For me at least, this implies that all occurrences of firing assertions 
should be tracked and fixed.

(For me at least, this also implies that assertions---OSL_ASSERT, 
OSL_ENSURE, OSL_FAIL, DBG_ASSERT---should only be used to flag illegal 
program states, not for unexpected but legal ones.  I don't think there 
is objection to this view in general.  I've only seen confusion about 
which macro was designed for which use case, and a sort of indifference 
a la "half of the time, OSL_ASSERT etc. are used with the wrong 
semantics anyway; shrug.")

Stephan