File Corruption

[Richard Gaskin]

Howard Bornstein wrote:

>> Have you found a repeatable recipe for creating the crash?  Once you have
>> that, we can examine the objects, systems, and sequence of steps to hone in
>> on the source of the problem.
>> 
>> Sometimes diagnostics take some work, but I've never encountered a bug yet
>> that could not ultimately be diagnosed.
> 
> Sorry for mixing terms. Perhaps what I've described isn't really "file
> corruption". But I would say that the stack somehow got corrupted.
> 
> Yes, it was a repeatable crash. No I couldn't find any obvious cause for
> this. This is where I become concerned about the IDE itself. The code was
> fine (demonstrated by cloning the card and having it work ok).
>
> If the problem is in the IDE, my diagnostic choices are limited because I
> don't have the time to go through all the IDE code to see where it might
> be crashing. We buy develoment tools we can rely on, not that we can
> debug. :-)

Of course.  If you submitted your example with your recipe they'd be able to
do that as you would expect.

>> What's on that card?
> 
> A better question for you is, if you explicted wanted to make Rev crash
> by going to a card, what could you do to it to cause this to happen? The
> answer, I believe, is "nothing". You shouldn't be able to do anything
> using the normal development tools that would cause Rev to crash. So why
> did a normally-working card suddenly start crashing?
> 
> I agree with you that eventually the cause could be found. However, I'm
> suggesting that the cause is likely to be something internal to Rev (and
> I'm assuming it's the IDE, not the engine), not programming error. I
> would label this type of occurrance "corruption."

But if the problem is related to code in the IDE, it's a bug in the IDE
and/or the engine (ideally a 4GL should never have a hard crash), but not
necessarily a matter of corrupted data.   "Corruption" refers to bad data
structures, not procedural bugs.

Does the problem occur outside of the IDE (e.g., in a standalone)?

> Since I found a quick method around the crash I took it (I have products
> to ship, you know), but if you or the Rev team is interested in
> diagnosing the cause of this crash, I think I've got a copy of the bad
> version of the stack around.

Do you have an FTP server you can post it?  If the problem is repeatable in
the latest version it sounds like the type of thing Rev support would be
interested in, but maybe the list members could turn it into a diagnostic
contest. :)

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
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