Subject: bug#35783: Guile-Parted crashes the installer on i686-linux

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 May 2019 10:17:29 +0200

Hi Mathieu,

Mathieu Othacehe <[email-masked]> skribis:

>> Longer-term it would be good to audit Guile-Parted: it probably
>> shouldn’t be possible for Guile-Parted to refer to “defunct” Parted
>> objects.
>
> Yup, with hindsight I realize that keeping Guile-Parted so low-level was
> a mistake. With a few more abstractions (gnu installer parted) could be
> less complicated.

I don’t know; as a rule of thumb, I think it’s good to make bindings a
direct mapping to the underlying library, and to build abstractions on
top of that.

That said, my point was more that it shouldn’t be possible to get a
null-pointer exception or a SIGSEGV when using Guile-Parted, even if you
make a mistake.  In this case, it seems that the underlying C object had
been reclaimed somehow; the bindings should protect against that.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.