kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

That sounds like a reasonable approach if the lag time of running the test
is low enough to not be a nuisance.  Are these crashes you speak of ones
that appear when the user first tries to switch to OpenGL, or later?

One alternative approach (that might actually work well alongside yours) is
a crash sentinel.
Basically if you save some value somewhere that indicates a clean exit of
the program, then if you start the program and the value isn't as expected,
you can assume that the program crashed, and take some action (for example,
falling back to Cairo canvas as a "safe mode" and alerting the user)

-Jon

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 8:11 PM, Chris Pavlina <pavlina.chris@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've been thinking about my intent to make KiCad fall back cleanly to
> Cairo when OpenGL isn't available. From what I can see, there are
> certain situations where trying to use OpenGL causes crashes that appear
> very hard to prevent.
>
> I really want to do something about this - they're hard to prevent, but
> I still don't think it's acceptable to crash out on the user. What if we
> compiled a small test binary that just tried to load an OpenGL canvas?
> We should be able to test for functionality pretty easily by starting
> that executable, and any crash would be confined to its own process. Is
> anyone opposed to this? I know it's not the cleanest solution, but I
> can't think of much better.
>
> --
> Chris
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers
> Post to     : kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers
> More help   : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
>