Practical suggestions for improving software quality

[Reini Urban]

On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Jonathan "Duke" Leto <jonathan at leto.net> wrote:
> This article by the main developer behind Redis has some very interesting
> ideas about practical ways of improving software quality:
>
> http://antirez.com/news/43
>
> I especially like that he has added various amounts of detailed output which
> often allows him to debug a situation without asking a user for a core
> dump/etc.
>
> Parrot could definitely benefit from implementing something similar.

Nice.
We've already got a backtrace on most platforms, which is better than
most others have.
But not in the weird platforms we support, and with which we have
problems with sometimes. Like the recent /proc/cpuinfo exit on darwin
without procfs.
But this was a normal exit(1) so only strace/dtruss helps.

But there are nice other ideas, like printing more environmental stuff,
client info (argv), env values, register values,/proc/pid/maps
we could add to our backtrace or some kind of parrot crash log.

ramtest, memcheck added to --gc-debug --leak-test? hmm. why not. but
it might cause more memory footprint for a normal vm most users will
most likely not want to carry around.

I love the link in the comments about this clang plugin:
https://github.com/yotamr/traces
to generate better API traces. This also traces deep, not only the
flat op calls.

I find it more disturbing that we still not generate manpages.
Which cmdline option?
$ man parrot
oops


-- 
Reini Urban
http://cpanel.net/   http://www.perl-compiler.org/