WINED3D: Implement GetCreationParameters

[Peter Beutner]

Alexandre Julliard schrieb:
> Peter Beutner <p.beutner at gmx.net> writes:
> 
>> Or look at it from the view of a user developing a winelib application. I'm sure
>> he will very much appreciate it when wine does a better parameter checking than MS 
>> and returns an error instead of a crash backtrace ;)
>> Imo a library is supposed to validate given parameters as much as possible and
>> rather return an error to the caller than to crash.
> 
> It's just the opposite actually. A good library (which the MS ones
> certainly aren't...) should crash on bad pointers, so that bugs can be
> found and fixed. Hiding bugs and trying to stumble along is the MS
> way, this is what leads to idiocy like having an exception handler in
> lstrlen(). So if in this case Windows doesn't have a check we
> certainly don't want one either.
I fail to see in how far returning an error is hiding a bug. 
Imho if the library detects an error[*] it should pass the information to the application
and let the application handle it. The library doesn't know if the application maybe can cope 
with it. Just ultimately crash is a bad idea imo.

Just take the example you have written something in Office and the given behaviour(passing a
NULL pointer) happens when you click on the print button. If it crashes your work is lost, if
it returns an error( and the app handles it in a sane way ) you just won't be able to print
it, but may save it and print it somehow else.
In that case my main concern is certainly not that a crash helps me to find a bug, but 
to don't loose my data ;)


[*] Obviously you can't check against every possible failure. And it certainly may be a bit too
much to check against bad pointers in general, but a NULL pointer check is cheap, easy and
certainly doable.