[Starpu-devel] Should we use more hooks ?

[Cyril Roelandt <cyril.roelandt@inria.fr>]

Hey !

I've just run "git grep "STARPU_ASSERT(0)", and well, it's still used a
lot in StarPU, even though it is now frowned upon (STARPU_ASSERT() does
nothing if --enable-fast is used, so StarPU may not abort when a
critical error occurred, which is why STARPU_ABORT() should be used
instead). I'm patching this :)

We're used to write STARPU_ASSERT(0), so we'll probably keep using it.
Students see it in the code and use it, or just think "hey, I should
call assert(0), and I should probably use the STARPU_ASSERT() macro to
do that", so they'll keep writing that. Still, this error is really easy
to spot.

Should we use SVN hooks to catch this kind of errors ? I'm really not
fond of pre-commit hooks, because developers should be able to do what
they want, and they may have a good reason to write "STARPU_ASSERT(0)"
[1], so I'd rather use a post-commit hook that sends an email to the
committer/starpu-devel/the whole world when a call to "STARPU_ASSERT(0)"
is added. This could look something like this:

#!/bin/sh

REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"

svnlook diff -r "$REV" "$REPOS" | grep "^+.*STARPU_ASSERT(0);" && exit 0

svnnotify                                                         \
        --repos-path      "$REPOS"                                \
        --revision        "$REV"                                  \
        --subject-cx                                              \
        --with-diff                                               \
        --from            foo@bar.com                             \
        --to              cyril.roelandt@inria.fr                 \
        --smtp            smtp.inria.fr                           \
        --header          "Thou shalt not use STARPU_ASSERT(0)"

exit 0

We should obviously use commit-email.pl or mailer.py instead of
svnnotify, and fix the arguments - this is just a test script I ran on
my machine.

What do you think ?

Cyril.

[1] "UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things,
as that would also stop them from doing clever things." (Doug Gwyn)