[CASSANDRA-15116] CommitLogArchiver.construct() throws a RuntimeException when it failed to create a directory

• Type: Bug
• Status: Triage Needed
• Priority: Low
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Fix Version/s: 5.x
• Component/s: Local/Commit Log
• Severity: Low
• Complexity: Low Hanging Fruit
• Discovered By: User Report
• Platform: All
• Assignee: Jon Meredith
• Reporter: Haicheng Chen

Authors

Jon Meredith

• Created: 06/May/19 01:12
• Updated: 07/Mar/23 10:54

Description

Dear Cassandra developers, we are developing a tool to detect exception-related bugs in Java. Our prototype has spotted the following throw statement whose exception class and error message indicate different error conditions.

 

Version: Cassandra-3.11 (commit: 123113f7b887370a248669ee0db6fdf13df0146e) 

File: CASSANDRA-ROOT/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/db/commitlog/CommitLogArchiver.java

Line: 110

throw new RuntimeException("Unable to create directory: " + dir);

 

RuntimeException is usually used to represent errors in the program logic (think of one of its subclasses, NullPointerException), while the error message indicates that construct() failed to create a directory. This mismatch could be a problem. For example, the callers may miss the possibility that construct() can fail to create a directory because it does not throw any IOException. Or, the callers trying to handle other RuntimeException may accidentally (and incorrectly) handle the directory creation failure.