Uploaded image for project: 'Qt'
  1. Qt
  2. QTBUG-63763

more user-friendly qFatal

    XMLWordPrintable

Details

    • Suggestion
    • Resolution: Won't Do
    • Not Evaluated
    • None
    • 5.6, 5.9.2
    • Core: Other
    • None

    Description

      Has it ever been considered to make qFatal() a bit more user-friendly?

       

      • depending on the platform, the message isn't shown (except possibly hidden in the post-mortem backtrace). That means users just see the application crash and have little way to know this is intended behaviour.
      • whatever happened may not be so fatal a crash is warranted.

       

      What I could see is something like you get in (La)Tex. I imagine a dialog being presented which shows the fatality message and then provides the user with 2 or 3 options:

      1- "Debug (causes a crash)

      2- "Exit"

      3- "Proceed with eyes crossed"

      Option 2 will take care of at least a partly graceful shutdown and should be safe in most situations. Option 3 could be activated by the developer and be useful in defensive programming, to handle situations that shouldn't arise but aren't actually fatal (and code would of course handle a return-from-qFatal() intelligently when it activates the option).

       

      Evidently this is relevant mostly for GUI applications, much less so for console-based applications. ("QXcbConnection: Could not connect to display - do you want to debug this?"  )

       

      I'm attaching a patch for Qt/Mac which I've been using for quite a while. I find that I can use the "Exit" option most of the time, without running into the system CrashReporter (which is the main point).

      Attachments

        Issue Links

          No reviews matched the request. Check your Options in the drop-down menu of this sections header.

          Activity

            People

              thiago Thiago Macieira
              rjvbertin René Bertin
              Votes:
              0 Vote for this issue
              Watchers:
              4 Start watching this issue

              Dates

                Created:
                Updated:
                Resolved:

                Gerrit Reviews

                  There are no open Gerrit changes