[vtk-developers] Debug leaks, dashboards and local behavior

[Brad King]

On 2/13/2012 11:46 AM, Marcus D. Hanwell wrote:
> I would like to change the default behavior of debug leaks. Currently
> when you turn it on, if you run tests locally and there are leaks a
> test will pass. You will only spot the failure if you run the tests
> with -V and scan the output. See,
[snip]
> Does anyone remember the reason for doing this, it seems to go back
> quite a way as it also looks for DART_TEST_FROM_DART.

Some history:

   http://vtk.org/gitweb?p=VTK.git;a=commitdiff;h=e771181e
   http://vtk.org/gitweb?p=VTK.git;a=commitdiff;h=f2d576b8
   http://vtk.org/gitweb?p=VTK.git;a=commitdiff;h=d70bff5a

I don't remember why it was decided not to enable it locally by default.
One hypothesis is that the feature calls exit(1) which is not so nice
for library code to do to applications.  However, since it is only
enabled by an explicit build option meant for debugging I see no real
reason not to do this by default.  An application can always set the
ExitError flag explicitly to choose its own behavior.

-Brad