Michael Ströder wrote:

hyc@symas.com wrote:

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h.b.furuseth@usit.uio.no wrote:

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On 12/09/15 16:24, michael@stroeder.com wrote:

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I've compiled with CFLAGS="-DNDEBUG" (also tried CPPFLAGS) but this did not help. slapd still crashes when hitting the assert.

Yes, portable.h #undefs it by default. OpenLDAP has always conflated logging, debug output and asserts behind LDAP_DEBUG. We've been saying for some time that we really ought to do something about that someday...

Yes, and that's more obviously a bug that we can fix.

Is it an easy fix?

Not for 2.4.

I think that in opposite to the OpenLDAP project most people out there consider this to be a really serious bug to be fixed really soon.

For now with my own builds I apply the patch removing the assert statement. But I wonder how many asserts statements are in the code which can be hit by invalid input leading to a crash.

Given the lack of OpenLDAP documentation about NDEBUG I have re-reverted my previous revert. The patch has been reinstated.

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Every use of assert is "assert(the code is correct)" - but that often depends on dynamic state, not just the statically written code.

Yes, dynamic state including invalid input. But IMO "assert(the code is correct)" should never be hit no matter how bad the input was. And it should definitely not crash the server (with system's ressource limits being a unavoidable exception). Rephrasing: The meaning of the statement "the code is correct" should also include "invalid input is properly handled as error" - no matter what.

In this particular case the code already handles the error perfectly well without the assert, so the assert doesn't serve any useful purpose.