Re: How important is mcheck?

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Florian" == Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> writes:

Florian> I see two bug reports about issues discovered with mcheck, so maybe it
Florian> is useful.

Florian> Could you move mcheck in-tree?

mcheck's been discussed a few times on the gdb lists (I forget which) in
the past; and also at least once on the glibc list.

Some nice things about mcheck are that it is low cost and easy to enable
by default for development builds; since many developers are on
glibc-based systems, it can help catch simpler bugs.  As you found it
caught a few in the past.

I suppose we could have main call mcheck.  That seems only mildly more
difficult.

Florian> Then you'd be able to enable it regardless of Python threading
Florian> support.

The problem is that mcheck is written in a way that inherently not
thread-safe.  This requires a fix in glibc.

Tom