Hi
Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com> writes:
> I investigated the crashes in "xmlnamespaces to xmlelement" patch and it
> looks like there was a badly used makeString function. The argument should
> not be null, elsewhere serialization to string fails - and deserialization
> doesn't support this case.
> I propose to add an assert there like (make check-world passed)
Hmmm ... while I don't necessarily object to this patch, we have a lot
of makeFoo() functions that build nodes, and hardly any of them have
asserts like this one. Why makeString() in particular? Is the fault
on the serialization side, instead? If there's a general expectation
that a String node's value isn't null, how come the original patch
worked at all?
Other makeFoo functions have arguments of Node * type, and there the NULL is not problematic,
or has arguments of valuable types, or holds flag xxxisnull and handles nulls correctly.
Similar is makeAlias(const char *aliasname, List *colnames), makeColumnDef(...)
but these functions crashes early due usage of pstrdup
DefElem doesn't do pstrdup and it can crash too, so the assertions should be there too.
Unfortunately, the original patch had not completed tests - there was missing forcing an expression serialization. So it worked. Surprisingly it fails on BSD, where expression serialization was forced (I didn't investigate what is different).
I think makeFoo() should produce a result that doesn't fail anywhere (when it was not modified badly later). So they should accept only data that we correctly serialize and deserialize.
Moreover, it fails early. The out func crashes too late, and it needs special regress tests. Unfortunately, there is not any flag that can signal, so some tests are missing.
Regards
Pavel
