[pulseaudio-discuss] [pulseaudio-commits] src/modules

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Fri, 2013-06-28 at 11:01 +0200, David Henningsson wrote:
> On 06/28/2013 10:19 AM, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> > On Fri, 2013-06-28 at 09:47 +0200, David Henningsson wrote:
> >> On 06/28/2013 04:40 AM, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> >>> On Thu, 2013-06-27 at 21:57 +0200, David Henningsson wrote:
> >>>> On 06/27/2013 06:19 PM, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> >>>>>     src/modules/alsa/alsa-mixer.c |    5 ++---
> >>>>>     1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> New commits:
> >>>>> commit 2613e4c74733e67d56af165df4637bf902b08508
> >>>>> Author: Tanu Kaskinen <tanu.kaskinen at linux.intel.com>
> >>>>> Date:   Thu Jun 27 18:47:12 2013 +0300
> >>>>>
> >>>>>        alsa-mixer: Add a couple of assertions
> >>>>>
> >>>>>        I checked the code to ensure that the assertions hold currently.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> diff --git a/src/modules/alsa/alsa-mixer.c b/src/modules/alsa/alsa-mixer.c
> >>>>> index f4410d7..b2f6c2e 100644
> >>>>> --- a/src/modules/alsa/alsa-mixer.c
> >>>>> +++ b/src/modules/alsa/alsa-mixer.c
> >>>>> @@ -4530,10 +4530,9 @@ void pa_alsa_path_set_add_ports(
> >>>>>         pa_alsa_path *path;
> >>>>>         void *state;
> >>>>>
> >>>>> +    pa_assert(ps);
> >>>>>         pa_assert(ports);
> >>>>> -
> >>>>> -    if (!ps)
> >>>>> -        return;
> >>>>
> >>>> Spontaneous NAK for the above change.
> >>>>
> >>>> I like the code the way I wrote it. Please explain.
> >>>
> >>> Why would you ever pass NULL path set? The whole point of the function
> >>> is to generate ports from a path set.
> >>
> >> For practical and robustness reasons, just like free/pa_xfree accept
> >> NULL pointers.
> >>
> >> But the question should not be "why would you ever...", but "if you ever
> >> do, what would you likely want to happen?"
> >>
> >> This opens up for code reuse, but more importantly, see this from a user
> >> perspective. We release PulseAudio to millions of users. Some of these
> >> have unusual hardware or software for which we can't or don't test here.
> >> Do you think that user wants his PulseAudio to crash, or do you think
> >> that the user wants it to work as good as it can?
> >>
> >> The user *might* be satisfied with having it working as good as it can,
> >> if not, (s)he will file a bug. (S)he will definitely not be satisfied
> >> with having PulseAudio crashing.
> >
> > If (s)he file a bug, it may be hard to track down, because the error
> > wasn't caught early enough. If it's hard to track down, the bug may
> > never be resolved.
> 
> First, consider the probability of an average user to a) actually file a 
> bug or b) doing something else, like turning PulseAudio off, going back 
> to Windows 8, or just become annoyed.
> 
> Second, consider the probability that the bug actually reaches us, which 
> is somewhat depending on which bug tracker to use (our bugtracker we 
> look at, but Ubuntu's bug tracker has far too many errors).

Ubuntu has an automatic crash report tool, doesn't it? So the
probability is quite high that assertion failures go somewhere.
Currently they don't reach our bug tracker, but perhaps that could be
arranged? Or I could subscribe to the crash reports myself?

> Third, consider the probability that the assertion failure actually 
> helps us fix the bug, and we wouldn't be able to resolve it without it. 
> In many cases, a stack trace is not enough to resolve the problem.

A stack trace helps pretty much always, though. The point was not that
we wouldn't be able to fix bugs without the stack trace if we put enough
effort in it, the point was that if debugging a bug is too difficult, we
may easily move on to other things and the bug is left abandoned in
bugzilla. A stack trace is not a guarantee of a fix, but it does improve
the chances a lot.

> Multiply all probabilities and you'll end up with something very low.
> 
> >> I'm having *a lot* of different assertion failures [1] in Ubuntu, more
> >> than I have time to fix, and it might not even be the best use of my
> >> time to fix them. And I'm not saying all of these assertions should be
> >> just removed, but certainly many of them would benefit from someone
> >> thinking them through and replacing them with proper error handling
> >> code. Which often are as simple as "if (a == NULL) return;"
> >
> > Of the assertions failures that you have had time to fix, how many have
> > been cases where the fix has been to replace the assertion with proper
> > error handling?
> 
> Good question. I don't know git enough to look it through and come with 
> statistics. My *guess* is that it is more than half but it could very 
> well be wrong.

My subjective experience is very different, but I don't have any stats either.

> > I can remember one: the UCM crash when the configuration
> > didn't have channel count set. That was incorrect assertion use, because
> > the assertion trapped an error in configuration, not code.
> 
> Here's another one: "alsa-mixer: It's valid to have zero elements in a path"

Thanks for digging that up.

> >> Assertions are a double edged sword - they are both helpful for
> >> developers, and something crashing our users' machines. Could it be that
> >> you mostly see this from the developer's side, and missing the user
> >> perspective?
> >
> > As a user, I want my software to have good quality. Assertions help with
> > that, because they improve the code maintainability,
> 
> But the opposite is also true: assertion lowers software's quality, 
> because they crash users' machines.
> 
> There might be a grand vision that some day, people will report all 
> assertions as they come by, and we will spend time fixing them, and we 
> end up with the best quality, but this is unrealistic utopia: It takes 
> several months to get PA into the distros, then to the users, then 
> feedback to us. Meanwhile we're working on a new PA release, and every 
> new release of PA, we add new features and new assertions. As a result, 
> that best quality release will never happen.

I don't have such grand vision. Features and refactoring add bugs, bug
fixing removes them. Until we reach feature completeness, I fully expect
PulseAudio to have a fair number of bugs. Assertions (documented
assumptions) increase maintainability, which speeds up development and
reduces, I believe, the total number of bugs, but assertions also make
the some of the bugs more annoying to the user. Whether the benefits of
higher maintainability or the benefit of less frequent crashing is more
useful for users is something that I don't think we will ever agree on.
There's no way of proving either case.

> > and thus can
> > prevent bugs from ever occurring. And if I encounter bugs, I prefer to
> > be able to provide a stack trace (preferably the stack trace would be
> > sent automatically to the developers).
> >
> > In case it's not clear how this particular assertion helps
> > maintainability: when I read the code, and I saw "if (!ps)", it told me
> > that the path set can be NULL in some situations. It didn't match with
> > my understanding of the purpose of the function, so I started to suspect
> > that my understanding is wrong. Well, it turned out that my
> > understanding was not wrong, and I wasted time figuring out how
> > pa_alsa_path_set_add_ports() is used.
> 
> The problem is in your reasoning, not in the code: "some situations" 
> does not have to be something actually occurring right now, it can also 
> be a theoretical situation happening some time in the future. Like in 
> the alsa-mixer patch referenced above: when the assertion was added, it 
> was probably valid, but then circumstances changed, and suddenly the 
> assertion was the cause of a bug.

Yes, changing the code can break old assumptions, and it's sometimes
very hard to be aware of those assumptions when doing changes, as was
the case with the alsa-mixer bug.

Now, back to the code that I changed: there are three parameters to
pa_alsa_path_set_add_ports() that are never NULL: ps, ports and core.
Why is it that you consider ps to be more likely to some day be NULL
than the two others, warranting the special handling?

-- 
Tanu