From: "Laurent Bercot" <ska-devel@skarnet.org>
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: Disable assert statements by default?
Date: Mon, 18 May 2020 19:34:19 +0000
Message-Id: <em4aa4b9ab-b7c6-4346-95b6-92e5ea0383c9@elzian>
In-Reply-To: <1ZU8S8ERRPKR9.35CUIBSS8QET7@8pit.net>
References: <1ZU8S8ERRPKR9.35CUIBSS8QET7@8pit.net>
Reply-To: "Laurent Bercot" <ska-devel@skarnet.org>
User-Agent: eM_Client/7.2.37929.0
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>The benefits of disabling asserts by default would be:
>
>	* Users would not run into program crashes triggered by
>	  development assert statements.
>	* Would probably cause a minor size reduction.

  The deciding factor here really is, in what environment do you
expect Alpine packages to run.

  Production environments and development environments are wildly
different beasts, and the bane of a distribution is that it has to be
suited for the widest possible audience.

  You don't test software in production, that's a golden rule. Production
is the worst place to test software. In production, you should have all
the hardening you can afford, all the mitigations you can afford, all=20
the
supervision and monitoring you have - but you *should not* artificially
make the software crash. Production is the place where you disable
asserts. If that's the intended environment for binary Alpine packages,
then yes, asserts should be disabled by default.

  A development/testing environment is the complete opposite. That's the
place where you want to stress-test the software, make it crash early=20
and
often. And you obviously want asserts enabled.

  My personal taste would be to tailor the distro towards production,
because that should be the majority of users, and thus, disable
asserts.

  But yes, that comes with drawbacks. The only way to reconcile the
conflicting needs is to build normal packages (with assertions disabled
and optimized for speed and size) *and* debug packages (containing
debug symbols, with assertions enabled, etc.) Some other distros that
shall remain unnamed do this, and it seems to be working well for them.

--
  Laurent