Jeff King authored May 12, 2017 and Junio C Hamano committed May 15, 2017

There's a convention in Git's code base to write assertions
as:

  if (...some_bad_thing...)
	die("BUG: the terrible thing happened");

with the idea that users should never see a "BUG:" message
(but if they, it at least gives a clue what happened).  We
use die() here because it's convenient, but there are a few
draw-backs:

  1. Without parsing the messages, it's hard for callers to
     distinguish BUG assertions from regular errors.

     For instance, it would be nice if the test suite could
     check that we don't hit any assertions, but
     test_must_fail will pass BUG deaths as OK.

  2. It would be useful to add more debugging features to
     BUG assertions, like file/line numbers or dumping core.

  3. The die() handler can be replaced, and might not
     actually exit the whole program (e.g., it may just
     pthread_exit()). This is convenient for normal errors,
     but for an assertion failure (which is supposed to
     never happen), we're probably better off taking down
     the whole process as quickly and cleanly as possible.

We could address these by checking in die() whether the
error message starts with "BUG", and behaving appropriately.
But there's little advantage at that point to sharing the
die() code, and only downsides (e.g., we can't change the
BUG() interface independently). Moreover, converting all of
the existing BUG calls reveals that the test suite does
indeed trigger a few of them.

Instead, this patch introduces a new BUG() function, which
prints an error before dying via SIGABRT. This gives us test
suite checking and core dumps.  The function is actually a
macro (when supported) so that we can show the file/line
number.

We can convert die("BUG") invocations to BUG() in further
patches, dealing with any test fallouts individually.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>