[244] in Kerberos
Re: reporting of errors.
daemon@TELECOM.MIT.EDU (Jerome H. Saltzer)
Fri Oct 30 14:23:01 1987
To: Robert S. French <rfrench@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Cc: rfrench@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, <steiner@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>, wesommer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU,
In-Reply-To: Robert S. French <rfrench@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>'s message of Fri, 30 Oct 87 12:40:25 EST
From: Jerome H. Saltzer <Saltzer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
> What I'm wondering about are things like, should library functions print
> error messages, if so, in what cases; or should they only pass on any
> errors they get, if so, how; is there any time when they should abort
> a program, etc.?
One way to think about this issue is as follows: for a library
routine to decide to print a message and abort, it is effectively
saying "for the awful situation I just discovered, there is
absolutely nothing that any application in the universe could
possibly want to--or be able to--do next, so I might as well abort."
There are cases where that is an appropriate position to take, (Unix
kernel panics tend to operate that way) but they are rare. On
the whole, I would expect the Kerberos library not to have any such
cases.
Jerry
