Need Help

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 17:37 -0500, Michael Stone wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 10:12:35AM +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 6:54 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
> > <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > >  Waqas Toor wrote:
> > >  | can anybody please see the log i am attaching and tell me is rainbow
> > >  | stoping it ??
> 
> As Tomeu said, Rainbow has detected that your activity's directory,
> /home/olpc/activities/Qirat.activity, is writable by the activity.
> Activities are not permitted to modify their own bundles. Consequently,
> Rainbow scuttled the launch. 
> 
> > >  You appear to have discovered a bug in Rainbow, which is dying with an
> > >  assertion failure.  Until Rainbow is fixed, you should do as Walter
> > >  suggested and disable Rainbow.
> 
> Is there some reason why activities need to write to their (or to other
> activities') bundle directories?

I would argue that activities should not be allowed to write to their
bundle directories, and that Rainbow is enforcing the correct
requirement.  I am calling this a bug because Rainbow should achieve
this without an assertion failure.  According to my software engineering
professors, a program should always handle any input data without an
assertion failure.  Assertions are for catching bugs in internal
invariants.  Therefore, any time an assertion failure is reached, it
represents a bug.

If Rainbow wants to disallow this, it should raise a specific exception.

> 
> > Can you enter a ticket about this? I don't know if Rainbow should
> > abort the launch in these cases, but certainly should give a more
> > helpful message.

#6640.

--Ben